Using a Mixed-Method Approach to Examine Party Positioning on Immigration and the European Union in Parliamentary Proceedings

This case study demonstrates the benefits of mixed methods in the analysis of party positioning, in particular, the combination of qualitative content analysis and corpus linguistic techniques. Using texts from parliamentary debates on immigration and European issues, I show that linguistic methods enable a much more fine-grained analysis of partisan positioning than the more commonly used party manifestos, roll-call votes, and expert surveys. In particular, I argue that a mixed-method approach, which combines a manual qualitative coding software tool (MAXQDA) and an automated quantitative tool of corpus linguistic (Wmatrix), favours a deep understanding of the thematic categories as well as the discursive argumentations utilized by speakers to support their positions.