The Chantelles of Benefits Britain: Collective representations of the clients of the welfare state in conservative British press (2008-2012)

Małgorzata Paprota

doi:10.17951/lsmll.2015.39.2.179

Abstract

This paper outlines the representation of Claimants, a key social actor relevant to the welfare state, as groups in two conservative British newspapers, the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph. With recourse to critical discourse analysis, in particular van Leeuwen’s 2008 work on the representation of social actors, as well as to corpus methods, the paper shows how the representation of this social actor in collective terms helps entrench the discourse of (mainly class-based) prejudice, thus working to delegitimise the welfare state.

Highlights

According to Raymond Williams, there is no such thing as masses; “there are only ways of seeing people as masses” (1960:319)
Małgorzata Paprota broader analysis of the discursive constructions of the British welfare state in the two dailies, this article is the second part of a study (Paprota, 2015) which identified the key social actors – or participants of social practice – relevant to the welfare state and examined these in terms of role allocation and agency
The research material comes from newspapers evincing a conservative discourse of welfare reform, proclaimed by the Daily Mail in line with that of the 2010-2015 government, and the opinion of the general public

Summary

Introduction

According to Raymond Williams, there is no such thing as masses; “there are only ways of seeing people as masses” (1960:319). This construction may be explicit, when the receipt of benefits is stated by the functionalisation (in van Leeuwen’s scheme, a category describing social actors by what they do) “claimants” or similar.

Results

Conclusion