Elite Discourse Research Articles

Exploring the Trade (Policy) Narratives in Economic Elite Discourse

Trade liberalization during the neo-liberal era since the 1980s has been on the political agenda of many countries. However, in recent years and especially in the course of rising populist movements, protectionist measures seem to be gaining importance again. Nationalist economic policies challenge the overly positive view on economic integration and the reduction of trade barriers established by standard economic theory. In contrast to politicians, for quite a long time the great majority of economists explicitly publicly supported trade liberalization policies. In this paper, we show how trade and trade related policies are addressed and framed in professional economic discourses. Thus, we follow a mixed-method-approach and combine quantitative textual analysis with critical discourse analysis to highlight dominant narratives and imaginaries present in these debates. By analyzing more than 400 trade-related research articles published in high-impact economic journals we highlight three core trade narratives which constitute the elite economists trade discourse: First, “free trade cheer-leading” describes a clear link between the alleged lopsidedness of economists in favoring free trade (policies) in the public and academic debate. Second, “Ignorance in a world full of nails” relates to particular methodological and conceptual leanings in the profession, which seem to deepen the dominance of an overall positive evaluation of trade. And third, “success breeds exporting breeds success” postulates a positive causal relation between a firm’s economic performance and its export orientation. We conclude that the narrow perspective in economic elite debates prevents a more comprehensive understanding of the multifaceted challenges related to international integration.

Propagated Preferences? Political Elite Discourses and Europeans’ Openness toward Muslim Immigrants

Immigration is among the most vividly discussed topics in Europe’s national parliaments in recent years, often with a particular emphasis on the inflow of Muslims. This article examines the link between articulations of national political parties (political elite discourses) and natives’ attitudes toward immigrants in Europe. It provides a nuanced view of this relationship by (i) distinguishing more (inclusionary) from less (exclusionary) immigration-friendly political elites and (ii) isolating natives’ openness toward two specific groups: Muslim immigrants and ethnically similar immigrants. Combining the European Social Survey with party manifesto data and other sources, the analysis reveals that political elite discourses perform better in explaining natives’ attitudes compared to national demographic or economic aspects. Native Europeans’ attitudes toward Muslim immigrants are more hostile in countries where political elites are more exclusionary and more welcoming where political elites are more inclusionary. In contrast, Europeans’ views on ethnically similar immigrants seem largely unaffected by exclusionary political elites. These findings suggest that political elites can play an important role in fostering or impeding immigrant integration by shaping public opinion, particularly toward more marginalized immigrant groups.

Concepts of historical memory of Kryashen in Tatarstan: elitists versions of history and collective memory

The article considers how ethnic entrepreneurs, manipulating various historical facts, formed opposing versions of the history of the origin of the Kryashen or Baptized Tatars in Tatarstan. The author describes the concepts of the historical memory of Kryashen, everyday ideas of Kryashen about history, as well as popular versions of the origin of baptized Tatars, which are supported by the population of the republic. The study is based on the analysis of textbooks on the history of the Tatar people, popular science literature, and the mass media, narratives from 170 interviews and questionnaire data from Kazan. An analysis of the data shows that at the level of mass representations, the most popular is the version promoted by the main political player, the elite of the republic: the Kryashens appeared as a result of the forced baptism of the Tatars in the 16th century. A popular version among the Kryashens themselves is that the Kryashens were never part of the Tatar people, because they were never Muslims. The study shows that at the level of the elite discourse the unity of the Tatar people is declared and the differences between the Tatars and the Kryashens are leveled. However, at the level of everyday interaction, the Tatars did not observe the same attitude towards the Kryashens.

Framing Refuge: Media, Framing, and Sanctuary Cities

The refugee sanctuary movement in the United States has shifted to include undocumented immigrants fleeing violence and economic strife. Given the negative tenor of coverage of undocumented immigration, and ties between framing and policy views on immigration, how the media frames sanctuary cities is likely to impact public perceptions of these cities and their policies. To assess media coverage of sanctuary policies, we analyzed articles from five national newspapers from 1980 to 2017 with both human content analysis and dictionary-based computational analysis. We find that framing around religion/morality and conflict has decreased, while stories focusing on crime and partisanship have increased. We discuss implications for public opinion and the likelihood that the American public will take their cues from media framing and elite discourse when it comes to sanctuary policies.

MAKING SENSE OF SOCIAL MEDIA PRIVACY: A FRAMING EXPERIMENT

As individuals trade information to access social media products and services, privacy has become increasingly valuable. Elite discourses have tended to frame privacy in terms of its vertical or institutional dimensions, but much less attention has been given to how users individually interpret and make sense of this complex notion. How do privacy sense-making processes intersect with privacy concerns and self-efficacy? What happens to these outcomes when an individual’s ideas about privacy collide with framing by an authoritative source? This project poses a 2x2 survey-based experiment with 628 subjects to explore these questions. We examine differences in privacy concerns and self-efficacy resulting from an individual’s own conceptualization of privacy, as well as from the presentation of similar and alternative framing of the concept. Preliminary results indicate that while individual conceptualizations show no differences in outcomes, higher levels of privacy self-efficacy result from the framing of privacy in horizontal terms and lower levels of privacy concern result when framing is consistent with the individual’s conceptualization. Strategic and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

More is more: Scaling political ecology within limits to growth

This piece responds to the article Is less more… or is more less? Scaling the political ecology of the future, where Paul Robbins (2019) discusses degrowth and modernism as two competing political imaginaries with regard to the growth-technology-environment nexus. Arguing from the perspective of ecological economics, I engage with the literature on political ecology to discuss the notions of limits to growth, Malthusianism, austerity and scarcity, as well as the role of technology as both environmental problem and solution. The paper exposes key divergences between different traditions in political ecology with regard to technological and economic scale. First, against the argument that limits to growth is a mere social construct, I call attention to research on ecological thresholds and to the perils of epistemic relativisms in a post-truth era. Second, against the idea that limits represent an elitist discourse, I call attention to long-standing traditions in emancipatory politics that defend limits in the name of justice. Third, against the thesis that more is less, I refer to mounting empirical evidence indicating that more is more (growth brings more environmental destruction, not less). I contend that political ecology can have much to gain from engaging with the political utopia of degrowth, but far less so from the technological utopia of modernism, which –I argue– reinforces status quo and offers false solutions to the environmental challenges of our time. Emancipation, I claim, is not about bringing more to more, but about bringing enough to everyone.

The content of their coverage: contrasting racially conservative and liberal elite rhetoric

ABSTRACT Theoretical and empirical evidence suggest that how elites talk about race may shape mass racial attitudes. But current work limits understanding this possibility by not systematically characterizing elite rhetoric on race. To shed light on the nature of racially liberal and conservative elite rhetoric, and therefore the potential for elites to shape mass racial attitudes, I analyze transcripts from two partisan news shows: The Rachel Maddow Show and The O’Reilly Factor. Pairing a case study with text-as-data methods, I provide insight into themes constituting racially liberal and conservative elite discourse. Racial liberals like Maddow emphasize that race matters–racial bias and discrimination still shape nonwhites’ life chances. In contrast, racial conservatives like O’Reilly contend that race does not shape life chances and serves only as an attention-seeking device. Identifying these divides helps shed light on the origins and dynamics of mass racial attitudes.

Understanding the sources of anti-Americanism in the Russian elite

ABSTRACTThis paper applies the model of opinion formation developed by John Zaller to the study of anti-American attitudes in the Russian elite. It examines the relative weight of political predispositions (interests, values, and experiences) versus immediately accessible “considerations” that depend on the flow of information in elite discourse. Based on survey data from 1995–2016, we find that two key political predispositions (identification as a Westernizer or Slavophile and service in the military and security agencies) are highly significant in the Yel’tsin period, when debates about Western intentions toward Russia were robust and the Kremlin’s messaging was diverse. By contrast, anti-American sentiment in the elite has become more uniform in the Putin era, which we attribute to an increasingly fervent anti-American narrative on state-controlled television. In a period of clear and unequivocal messaging emanating from Kremlin-controlled media, these signals have surpassed civilizational identity and service in the force structures in importance.

Where the Real People Meet the Real Elite

Abstract This article clarifies how elitist elements are integrated into populist discourse by analyzing political speeches using this incongruent style. First, it introduces a method to identify populist, elitist, and pluralist discourse based on a shared logic, defining populism at an intercontextual level. Second, speeches by Donald Trump (US), Boris Johnson (UK), and Thierry Baudet (NL) are analyzed in their contexts to clarify their political styles and are then compared to see where these styles meet. The populism-elitism mix goes well with nationalism, as all three politicians combine the style with a nationalist ideology, which unites the people with the elite. Coalitions are created between the people and the “good” elite to fight the “bad” elite. Furthermore, the mix has rhetorical-strategic advantages, such as profiling oneself as unique on the political field. Overall, the blend shows political significance, justifying thoughtful academic consideration alongside the broad attention for full populism.

Authority, politicization, and alternative justifications: endogenous legitimation dynamics in global economic governance1

Recent mobilization against core tenets of the liberal international order suggests that international institutions lack sufficient societal legitimacy. We argue that these contestations are part of a legitimation dynamic that is endogenous to the political authority of international institutions. We specify a mechanism in which international authority increases the likelihood for the public politicization of international institutions. This undermines legitimacy in the short run, but also allows broadening the justificatory basis of global governance: Politicization allows civil society organizations (CSOs) to transmit alternative legitimation standards to global elite discourses. We trace this sequence for four key institutions of global economic governance – the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, and the NAFTA – combining data on authority and protest counts with markers for CSOs and legitimation narratives in more than 120,000 articles in international elite newspapers during 1992–2012. The uncovered patterns are consistent with a perspective that understands legitimation dynamics as an endogenous feature of international authority, but they also show that alternative legitimation narratives did not lastingly resonate in the global discourse thus far. This may explain current backlashes and calls for active re-legitimation efforts on part of international institutions themselves.

A INSTRUÇÃO PÚBLICA DO SERRO/MG COMO MICROCOSMO DA EDUCAÇÃO BRASILEIRA (1821-1840)

The history of Brazilian Education in the period between 1821 and 1840 is analyzed from a microcosm that is the city of Serro/MG, an ancient gold village of the eighteenth century. Because of its own characteristics such as the permanence of the patronage as a local power structure, the discourse of the local elites on the modernization of Brazilian Education and a constant initiative to introduce and maintain public education, especially the first letters, we believe that the city of Minas Gerais is as a microcosm of education in national territory. The methodology is based on the mapping, collection and analysis of documents of public and private archives as well as reading the books of authors specialized in the subject. The result is that we present a microcosm of national education from the period 1821-1840 from the most important city of Comarca do Serro do Frio.

Elite Hacking: Public Opinion Formation and Elite Fragmentation

In the 2016 U.S. General Election, agents of the Russian Federation attempted to influence the election through a multi-faceted campaign, which included the spread of of fake news as well as cyber attacks on campaigns, individuals, and even electoral infrastructure. Elite reaction was swift. Unlike on most issues, however, elites in the Republican Party remain divided. Leveraging this rare and enduring intra-party disagreement in today's age of polarized parties, we are able to begin to understand how people react to conflicting elite cues that are free from usual partisan considerations. This enables us to present a theory of elite-led opinion formation that includes intra-party polarization, expanding on the current literature. We theorize that in a scenario where there is a divided party and a unified party, those who identify with the unified party will form crystallized opinions that are reflective of those held by party elites. Members of the divided party will have perceive conflicting elite cues, and form opinions that are more malleable and susceptible to change from future elite cues. We test this theory by examining the impact of salience of Russian hacking as well as different levels in elite cohesion on belief that Russian hacking actually took place heading into the 2018 election. This is carried out through a two-pronged approach, leveraging a nationally-representative online survey (N=1000) and two survey experiments. We find that different levels of elite agreement on Russian hacking, rather than the information about Russian hacking itself, caused respondents to update their perceptions of Russian hacking. This finding is particularly strong for the Republican subsample in our experiment. We also find strong evidence that supporters of Trump are resistant to information, going as far as to demonstrate the opposite effect when presented with information that directly contradicts the President's position. Furthermore, we find similar results regarding elite influence on opinion for trade policy, a much less salient issue in comparison to Russian hacking. In doing so, we not only provide new evidence on the impact of disourse around Russian hacking, but add to a growing literature on elite discourse to include intra-party discourse and attachment to groups of the elites within a single party.

The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Tweet: How #NotTheEnemy Twitter Discourse Defended the Journalistic Paradigm

When U.S. President Donald Trump called the press the “enemy of the American people” and “FAKE NEWS” in a February 2017 tweet, his statement inspired a robust debate about the credibility, institutional norms, and national significance of the press, which were debated on social media by both journalists and non-journalists using the popular hashtag #NotTheEnemy. Because previous research suggests that elite discourse of “fake news” decreases public trust in the press, this tweet presented a unique danger to the journalistic paradigm and public trust in American journalism. Through a mixed-method approach combining quantitative content analysis and qualitative textual analysis, this research explores the major themes and dominant sentiments of this public discourse about the press and analyzes #NotTheEnemy’s contributions to reinforcing the journalistic paradigm in the wake of the president’s attack and its impact on American public opinion of and trust in the media.

Элитаристский дискурс справедливости: теоретические истоки

<p>В настоящей статье автор обращается к элитарной стороне социальной справедливости. Данное обращение является насущным в контексте современной России — также как и обращение к эгалитарному принципу справедливости. Однако, в отличие от последнего, социальная справедливость в ее элитарной версии обращена не к построению социального государства, а к формированию справедливой общественной иерархии. Изучение элитарной концепции социальной справедливости предполагает обращение к богатому историческому дискурсу элитаризма, истоки которого находятся в Античности.</p><p>В статье проанализированы концепции Платона и Аристотеля, а также охарактеризовано средневековое аристократическое понимание справедливости. Показано, что античный дискурс формировался во многом в качестве ответной реакции на казнь Сократа.</p><p>Большим значением обладает также элитаристский дискурс Нового времени, возникший вместе с формированием консервативных концепций. В свою очередь, эти концепции стали ответом на эгалитаризм эпохи Просвещения и Великой французской революции.</p><p>В связи с формированием «второй волны» консерватизма во второй половине XIX в. рассмотрены элитаристские концепции русского мыслителя К. Н. Леонтьева и испанца Х. Ортега-и-Гассета. В случае двух последних показано, что, защищая аристократию, они отстаивали сами культурные основы западной цивилизации.</p><p>С точки зрения автора статьи, определенные положения элитаристского дискурса, в частности концепции Ортега-и-Гассета, могут явиться важным ориентиром для общественного строительства в современной России.</p>

The Land Is Ours. Vulnerabilization and resistance in informal settlements in Puerto Rico: Lessons from the Caño Martín Peña Community Land Trust

Between 2002 and 2004, residents from seven informal settlements located along the Caño Martín Peña, a highly polluted channel in San Juan, Puerto Rico, established a community land trust to regularize land tenure and protect the historically marginalized barrios against the threat of displacement, as an unintended consequence of the ecological restoration of the channel. This article looks at the Fideicomiso de la Tierra del Caño Martín Peña (the Caño Martín Peña Community Land Trust or Caño CLT) from a political ecological perspective, as it aims to identify how the interests, policies and discourse of political and economic elites function to perpetuate the vulnerability of residents in unplanned settlements, and how the Caño CLT is an effective instrument to counter this process. The Caño CLT supports on-site rehabilitation by taking land out of a hostile market, reinforcing solidarity networks and democratizing sustainable planning through ongoing participatory planning-action-reflection processes. It is a critical piece of the wider comprehensive development ENLACE Caño Martín Peña Project, whose benefits include reducing the risk of flooding and restoring the environmental qualities of the mangrove channel. The article considers that informal settlements like those in the Martín Peña area are often located in a city’s most environmentally vulnerable, yet ecologically and geographically valuable areas, prone to land grabs after disasters. By looking at public discourse in Puerto Rico and the U.S. in the aftermath of the devastating hurricanes that struck the island in 2017, we analyze the assumed links between informality and vulnerability and how these assumptions are used to spur public support for displacements. The article argues that documenting and theorizing the knowledges produced by the enduring resistance of the Martín Peña communities can support residents in unplanned settlements in the Global South to come together and create mechanisms that protect land and counter vulnerabilization.

Deportation Platforms: The AWS-ICE Alliance and the Fallacy of Explicit Agendas

In this paper, I analyze elite discourse in the context of the increasing role played by large-scale corporate platforms in federal immigration enforcement in the US Specifically, I focus on Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) alliance with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Incorporating Marx’s (2016) “fallacy of explicit agendas” as a heuristic for contextualizing recent employee challenges to company CEO Jeff Bezos, I show how the fallacy serves to conceal far more about the AWS alliance with ICE, an organization with a long track record of deeply troubling practices. The secrecy that is fostered by such discourse also obscures the growing dependency of government entities on large-scale technologies of marginalizing surveillance that threaten civil liberties and rights of refugees and immigrants.

(Re)moving the Masses: Colonisation as Domestic Displacement in the Roman Republic

Metaphors move—and displace—people. This paper starts from this premise, focusing on how elites have deployed metaphors of water and waste to form a rhetorical consensus around the displacement of non-elite citizens in ancient Roman contexts, with reference to similar discourses in the contemporary Global North and Brazil. The notion of ‘domestic displacement’—the forced movement of citizens within their own sovereign territory—elucidates how these metaphors were used by elite citizens, such as Cicero, to mark out non-elite citizens for removal from the city of Rome through colonisation programmes. In the elite discourse of the late Republican and early Augustan periods, physical proximity to and figurative equation with the refuse of the city repeatedly signals the low social and legal status of potential colonists, while a corresponding metaphor of ‘draining’ expresses the elite desire to displace these groups to colonial sites. The material outcome of these metaphors emerges in the non-elite demographic texture of Julius Caesar’s colonists, many of whom were drawn from the plebs urbana and freedmen. An elite rationale, detectable in the writings of Cicero, Livy, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and others, underpins the notion of Roman colonisation as a mechanism of displacement. On this view, the colony served to alleviate the founding city—Rome—of its surplus population, politically volatile elements, and socially marginalised citizens, and in so doing, populate the margins of its empire too. Romulus’ asylum, read anew as an Alban colony, serves as one prototype for this model of colonisation and offers a contrast to recent readings that have deployed the asylum as an ethical example for contemporary immigration and asylum seeker policy. The invocation of Romulus’ asylum in 19th century debates about the Australian penal colonies further illustrates the dangers of appropriating the asylum towards an ethics of virtue. At its core, this paper drills down into the question of Roman colonists’ volition, considering the evidence for their voluntary and involuntary movement to a colonial site and challenging the current understanding of this movement as a straightforward, series of voluntary ‘mass migrations’. In recognising the agency wielded by non-elite citizens as prospective colonists, this paper contends that Roman colonisation, when understood as a form of domestic displacement, opens up another avenue for coming to grips with the dynamics of ‘popular’ politics in the Republican period.

Inconvenient National Discourse and the People Who Walk to Hear It: the Case of the Slovak National Pilgrimage

The presence of nationalism in the Catholic Church, ostensibly global in its mission and outlook, has been a contentious issue especially in the post-communist countries of East-Central Europe. Events like the Slovak national pilgrimage to Šaštín, broadcast across the country on television, radio and internet, offer Catholic elite in Slovakia a rare chance to freely weave national history and national devotion into religious practice and discourse, but what does elite discourse actually tell us about the production and reproduction of nationhood in the Church? This article calls for increased exploration of reception of elite discourse in the media, not only to gauge audience reaction, but to better understand how the would-be recipients of these messages play a role in producing, reproducing or contesting these media constructions of national identity.

Hegemony in Post-Soviet Georgia: Types of Nationalisms and Masculinities

The article concerns the political history of the post-Soviet Georgian state. The new post-Soviet nation-state is being created and gradually transformed into a political economy of liberal democracy and neoliberal capitalism. In this transformation, Georgia moves away from the Soviet Union and its successor Russia and acquires European identity via the discourse and practices of national political and economic elites. The discursive production of this hegemonic pro-Western nationalism is intertwined with the production of hegemonic masculinities. This article analyzes the discourses of these elites and reveals three types of hegemonic masculinity, which acquire their meaning alongside and through the processes of national independence, militarization, and/or neoliberal reforms and policies. These new masculinities aim to replace old, Soviet, hegemonic masculinities in Georgia and thus, a new kind of hegemonic culture and patriarchy is being created. Further, the historical domination of pro-Western nationalism can be interpreted variously: while Georgia is open, nearly from the outset, to the Western-style political system (liberal democracy), one can also look to certain historical moments as the turning points when an active neoliberal transformation and (discursive) attainment of European identity began in Georgia. Keywords: nationalism; masculinities; hegemony; post-Soviet Georgia.

Civilizational discourse of the Russian political elite in the context of interpretations of modernity

Civilizational discourse of the Russian political elite in the context of interpretations of modernity