Beyond borrowing. Bridging political science and discourse analysis
(2026) Political Research Exchange — Vol. 8, n° 1 (2026)
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- The study of political discourse sits at the intersection of political science and discourse analysis, yet genuine integration between these fields remains rare in practice. Political science attends primarily to situated meaning (who speaks, from what institutional position, and toward what ends), leaving linguistic variation underexamined; discourse analysis offers fine-grained accounts of internal meaning (the reality constructed through lexical and grammatical choices), but the political implications of that meaning receive less sustained attention. The paper shows that subordinating either dimension is more than a matter of emphasis: because the two produce meaning jointly, an analysis tilted toward one rests on assumptions about the dimension it leaves aside and may therefore misread the meaning it sets out to reconstruct. In response, it develops a coding scheme that holds the two together and supports both close reading and systematic analysis across a corpus. Applied to Belgian politicians' and experts' conceptions of legitimate decision-making during the COVID-19 pandemic, the scheme shows what an integrated analysis recovers that an asymmetric one would miss. The paper thereby argues for a study of political discourse in which interdisciplinarity is enacted in the texture of the analysis.
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Rondiat, C. (2026). Beyond borrowing. Bridging political science and discourse analysis. Political Research Exchange, 8(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/2474736X.2026.2708638 (Original work published 2026)