Selected Research Papers in Social Change, Education, Labour Market, and Criminology Volume II

2 Theoretical assumptions

The area of our research is the social world as it is perceived by people. We treat communication as a process of group construction of shared, intersubjective visions of the world. Consequently, models of thinking about the energy crisis will be researched not as objective and real phenomena with a claim to rightness or its lack, but, what is worth stressing once again, a specific way of defining social reality, real through its consequences (as underlying the actions of individuals). We are going to use the theory of social representations as offering, in our opinion, the best way of reaching collectively constructed common knowledge, which may principally influence the success or failure of long-term strategies of solving energy-related problems.

3The notion of social representations relates to collective representations of social phenomena of a given society or group, whose aim is to make it possible to undertake action oriented towards them and allow the society members to communicate. Appearance of a new object, problem or phenomenon in the social surrounding of a group activates the processes of anchoring and objectification. Anchoring is a process thanks to which objects or phenomena are classified, named, compared, assessed and included in the already existing knowledge

2 Swia tkiewicz-Mos ny / Wagner (2010)

3 Moscovici (1963)

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4structures5. Objectification is a simultaneous process of giving abstract ideas a material shape in the form of symbols, pictures and metaphors6. A new element of reality which was assigned to a given category during the process of anchoring and which was named is now reproduced: its most important features are presented in the form of pictures of given form and content. The process of objectification takes place on the group level through direct communication or media discourse, which was the object of research in this particular case.

According to a model of origin of social representations78, the media plays the most significant role in the first stage after a new idea or phenomenon has appeared. Due to their communicational reach and large audience, the media generates relatively undifferentiated visions and interpretations which are common reference points9. The next phase consists of confronting such messages with beliefs and norms of particular groups. At this stage, the media multiplies opinions, and messages are directed to given recipients who reorganise their networks of meanings and take a proper position towards the new objects.

3 Hypotheses

The main hypothesis of the conducted analysis assumes that the structure of the analysed social representations is dominated by political context and they themselves become a part of political discourse. ‘Domination: means here shaping the core of social representation – the core according to structural S.R. analysis belongs to the concepts, words or phrases with the highest number of connections with other key words (highest values in cross tables) but not necessarily those which are used most often to describe phenomena (see Abric, 2001). Our hypotheses may, therefore, be formulated as follows. We suppose that the media discourse related to the energy crisis creates specific subdiscourses which can be characterised as:

• Ecological subdiscourse – taking the perspective of environmental protection and raising issues connected to the protection of resources and usage of natural energy sources, minimising harmful effects of human action.

• Economic subdiscourse – related to the criterion of profit; refers to the logic of market, price, supply and demand; rising issues connected to specificity of the power industry, its subjects and conditionings.

• Political subdiscourse – related to the organisational level of the country, local and international; here we deal with the view of the governors, interests of different social groups, orientation on political capital. We can

4 Markova (2000: 448)

5 Moscovici (1984)

6 Trutkowski (2002)

7 Wagner et al. (1999)

8 Dosie (1993)

9 Clemance (2001)

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anticipate using the energy crisis as an element of persuasive strategy used by politicians towards recipients.

• Technological subdiscourse – related to technical questions in connection to the generating and distribution of energy. This is the perspective of ‘engineers’ and scientists which prefers the idea of new solutions, innovations and technological background, but also problems related to their implementation.

• Subdiscourse of the ‘locals’ – this specific name is used to describe a discourse which takes the perspective of the so-called average citizens, individuals and dwellers of areas where nuclear powers plants are planned. It seems that this perspective should be quite often taken by the mass media. It includes everyday problems, individualised points of view and anecdotes.

We suppose also that the political subdiscourse creates the core of social representations of the energy crisis presented in the press and, consequently, may influence the shaping of the social representation of it the most significantly.

4 Methodology

The hypotheses and research results presented in the paper refer to its first, explorative phase. The objective of this stage was to describe a fragment of social reality – the media discourse related to a distinguished area. It should be stressed that this research does not aim to give normative evaluation; at this stage we do not undertake to answer the question of how the discourse on the energy crisis should be conducted or what the consequences of the current situation may be. According to our assumptions, the first part of the analyses conducted using quantitative methodology was focused on reconstructing social frameworks of representations of the energy crisis encoded in the press discourse. These frameworks were to set the boundaries of semantic areas characteristic for different groups taking part in public discourse. The first aim of the structural analysis was to check if it is possible to appoint different subdiscourses within the media discourse on the energy crisis, and recreate their structure by identifying keywords and their mutual connections. We assume here that a quantitative listing of the most common word compositions within a paragraph reflects a way of thinking, connecting notions and facts, although a full picture of contextual differences and similarities is possible to get only during a qualitative analysis, which has been planned as the second stage of this research.

In the initial phase of the research, a review was conducted of press reports published after 1991 in Poland. The date was determined by a practical criterion of accessibility of electronic databases of press texts. The databases were searched from the point of view of key phrases: crisis and energy, crisis and power industry, energy crisis. For the needs of the research, ‘the energy crisis’ was defined as crisis in the are related to energy (electricity, nuclear energy, renewable energy).

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1011The research was conducted on titles of daily newspapers and weekly magazines: Gazeta Wyborcza, Rzeczpospolita, Dziennik Polska-Europa-Swiat1213, Fakt1415, Superekspress, Polityka, Newsweek1617, Wprost. A unit for analysis here was one article. More than 4,000 articles were found. Articles that are connected with “body” energy (love, fitness, etc.) were removed. A total of 1614 articles remained.

As a consequence, a frequency of appearance of the phrase ‘energy crisis’ in particular titles was studied. In two of them, Fakt and Superekspress, the energy crisis did not appear almost at all in our context. In the remaining papers and magazines, the phrase appeared several times a year. We observed that a particularly large number of articles related to energy appeared at the turn of a year (in November, December, January and February), probably because the cold season is starting and energy requirements are increasing. Further analysis concerned texts only from the years 2000, 2001, 2004, 2005, 2008 and 2009, as in these periods the phrase ‘energy crisis’ appeared visibly more often (see Table A1 in Appendix A). It is difficult to point to one reason for such an increase in the media’s interest in energy. It could have been caused by various issues: changing oil prices or political situations such as the hot topic in 2008/2009 of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, as a consequence of which Slovakia and other European countries had problems with energy supply.

The research material selected in this way covers 995 articles and underwent further analysis. First of all, a dictionary of keywords was created. In order to do so, a listing of words was prepared according to their appearance frequency, and then words of syntactic meaning (connectors, prepositions, verbs, particles, pronouns etc.) were removed, and only nouns, adjectives and independent verbs were left. Words with the same core but different grammatical forms were joined into one category, and words appearing only once were removed from the list. The next step was to create dendrograms illustrating the concentrations, using the Jaccard index as a measure of similarity. We decided to use Qualitative Data Miner, which is Provalis software (http://www.provalisresearch.com/ QDAMiner/ QDAMinerDesc.html ) dedicated to text analysis. These tools were obtained through the computation of similarity or co-occurrences indexes and the application of hierarchical cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling on all or

10 Gazeta Wyborcza is the best-selling (after tabloid Fakt) daily newspaper, and published since 1989. It is considered the most influential and opinion-forming newspaper in Poland.

11 Rzeczpospolita is a popular (second biggest after Gazeta Wyborcza) Polish newspaper. They describe themselves as liberal concerning the market and economy and conservative concerning customs and morals.

12 Dziennik. Polska-Europa-Swiat, daily newspaper published from 2006 to 2009 by Axel Springer Poland (it was then merged with Gazeta Prawna). Its political profile was more right wing than Gazeta Wyborcza (which is considered as left-liberal).

13 Fakt, the best-selling tabloid in Poland.

14 Superekspress, tabloid (second largest after Fakt), published since 1991.

15 Polityka – founded in 1957, centre-left weekly magazine.

16 Newsweek – weekly magazine.

17 Wprost – weekly magazine, nationwide since 1989. It is considered liberal and conservative.

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selected codes18. The Jaccard similarity coefficient was used as a similarity measure. Jaccard “is calculated from a fourfold table as a/(a+b+c), where a represents cases where both items occur, and b and c represent cases where one item is found but not the other” (QDAMiner Help file). The situation where both items are not reported is ignored. A unit of analysis here was a paragraph, which was considered a certain unity of thought embracing a given motive and, as such, giving a more precise idea about connections of notions in a specific way of conceptualising the crisis than in the case of the whole article. Hence, a is the number of paragraphs where both items are reported in the paragraph, b is the number of paragraphs where item 1 is reported but not item 2, whereas c is the number of paragraphs where item 2 is reported but not item 1.

A parallel research activity was to create co-existence matrices of words within one paragraph and selected words connected the most often in the analysed texts.

As a result, characteristic word clusters were found, as well as complex ‘structural trees’, which illustrate mutual relations of keywords within the press discourse.

5 Research results

Figure 1 shows which concepts are most frequently mentioned together with the concept of ‘energy’ in terms of the Jaccard coefficient. Most concepts refer to the political field (Poland, Europe, government, gas, Russia, security etc.). This supports the thesis of the dominance of the political discourse.

A dimensional analysis shows that in a collection of keywords two main groups of cluster characters can be distinguished (see Figure 2). The first, which could be called the main cluster (because of numbers of words and their interrelations within it), is dominated by economic and administrative contexts. We can observe close relations of the notions policy, energy, gas, economy, state, Poland, Russia and Europe, market, shares, investment, company, money, power plant and investment. Such connections indicate the placing of the issues of the power sector in the economic and administrative contexts, on the level of macrophenomena of social life, connected more with foreign policy than internal affairs.

18 For more information about using the Jaccard similarity coefficient see for example Oikonomakou et al. (2004: 65-81).

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Figure 1: Proximity plot: Concepts connected with the concept of “Energy”

The second group of words includes notions related rather to the internal affairs field (see cluster 2): prime minister, president, Putin and ministry, weaker connected with keywords such as act of law, parliament, commission or enterprises, electricity, euro or zloty. It could be surprising that Putin is included in an internal affair discourse, but it must be said that his name is a kind of negative collective symbol in government–opposition discussions in Poland. When the energy issue is discussed in a foreign affairs context, ‘Russia’ is usually used as a subject.

These two discursive fields both appear in a very similar form in all analysed texts without mentioning particular titles, and are characteristic of specific everyday newspapers: Gazeta Wyborcza, Rzeczpospolita and Dziennik Polska-EuropaSwiat. Titles in the tabloid press only occasionally referred to the energy crisis (single articles in Fakt and Superekspress), so they were excluded from the results.

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Figure 2: Words similarity map

Energy problems are usually presented in a political context as international problems, but this context is almost always confined to the context of European politics and the EU, not the globe. Russia is the country mentioned by name in this discourse.

The main actors in the above clusters are politicians (particular names are mentioned, whose frequency differs depending on the title). It is interesting that the regularity observed in the whole material is the tendency to recall the President by mentioning the name of the office and the Prime Minister by giving the name of Donald Tusk.

Ecological motives appear marginally and words from this area are very loosely connected with other subdiscourses and never constitute the main article content. In the analysed period, only Gazeta Wyborcza included micro-level references – words related to energy-saving in households or increases in electricity costs.

Principally, structural frameworks of social representations of the energy crisis set in the above-described way are not really different in the case of particular titles of everyday press. A different way of problematising the subject is visible in the Newsweek magazine, where text representations are less numerous. It was observed that basic clusters are words creating the economic and ecologic subdiscourse. The former relates, however, to the household perspective, which

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indicates the micro-level: production, household, power industry, electricity), whereas the latter connects the notions of energy, renewable sources, turbines, wind and windmills with elements of the economic discourse: euro, investment, Polish currency.

Concentrations which would let us prove the existence subdiscourse and technological subdiscourse of the ‘locals’ were not observed. Words which could be identified as their indicators (e.g. neighbourhood, workers, life conditions or science, research, experts, scientists) appeared occasionally and were loosely connected with other keywords.

6 Summary

Structural frameworks of the energy crisis representations in the Polish press are, above all, related to the economic and political areas. Peripheral motives related to the ecological discourse (renewable energy sources, harmfulness of getting energy from traditional sources) are considered also in categories of market profitability. Elements of the technological subdiscourse or the subdiscourse of the ‘locals’ are of scattered character and are included in other discursive areas. Deepened, hermeneutic analysis of their role in these areas will be an aim of the following stage of research.

After the first stage of research a hypothesis on political discourse domination can be proved: 1) The political perspective seems to be the most important one for the authors of press articles and political interests are most often pointed to by them. 2) It is some kind of ‘core’ of the public debate. The political concept as state, UE, politics, national safety etc. are most frequently connected with the other keywords. Context interpretation lets us formulate conclusions about the political perspective on energy issues. But at the same time it is important to add that the distinguished ideal types of

subdiscourses overlap. What is meant here is mainly the logic of economics, which expansively penetrates into other dimensions of social reality and subordinates them to itself. A predominance of keywords related to economic semantics was observed, but its deeper characteristics need further context analyses. Identification of a specific dictionary of talking about the energy crisis in the Polish press allows for a conclusion about the supremacy of the macrostructural perspective and economic-political contexts. This shall be our starting point of qualitative analyses of the second stage, whose purpose is to lead us to identifying communicative strategies realised by senders and the characteristics of the process of generating social representations of the energy crisis in Poland inscribed into the press discourse.

We are hoping to publish the results of the second stage of research in 2011.

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References
Abric, J. (2001): A structural approach to social representations. In: K. Deaux & G. Philogene (Eds.): Representations of the social: Bridging theoretical traditions, Oxford: Blackwell, p. 42-47.

Doise, W. (1993): Debating social representations. In: G.M. Breakwell & D.V. Canter (Eds.): Empirical Approaches to Social Representations, Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 90-109.

Clemance, A. (2001): Social Positioning and Social Representation. In: K. Deaux & G. Philogene (Eds.): Representation of the Social, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, p. 83-95.

Markova, I. (1963): Amédée or how. Annual Review of Psychology, 4, p. 231-260 Moscovici, S. (2000): Attitudes and opinions, to get rid of it: social representations from a

dialogical perspective. Culture and psychology, 6(4), p. 419-460. Moscovici S. (1984): The Phenomenon of Social Representation. In: R. M. Farr & S.

Moscovici (Eds.): Social Representation, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, p. 3-69.

Oikonomakou N., Vazirgiannis, M. (2004): A Review of Web Document Clustering Approaches. In: S. Sirmakessis (Ed.): Text Mining and Its Application, Springer Verlag: Berlin Heidelberg NY, p. 65-81.

Swia tkiewicz-Mos ny, M., Wagner, A (2010): Premier kreator. Komunikacyjne strategie budowania spójnos ci grupowej na przykl adzie expose premiera Marcinkiewicza, Kaczyn skiego i Tuska, In: M. Czerwin ski & P. Nowak (Eds.): Je zyk IV RP, KrakówLublin 2010, p. 121-134.

Trutkowski C. (2002): Teoria spolecznych reprezentacji i jej zastosowania. In: M. Marody (Ed.): Wymiary z ycia spol ecznego. Polska na przel omie XX i XXI wieku, Scholar: Warszawa, p. 373-401.

Wagner W., Duveen, W. G., Farr, R., Jovchelovitch, S., Lorenzi –Cioldi, F., Markova, I., Rose, D. (1999): Theory of method of social representations. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, p. 95 -125.

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Appendix A
Table A1: Articles on energy crisis 1991–2009 in Polish newspapers and magazines Daily newspaper (without tabloids) Magazines Total

1991 0 1 1 1992 22 3 25 1993 38 2 40 1994 32 4 36 1995 61 8 69 1996 67 0 67 1997 58 0 58 1998 53 23 76 1999 13 20 33 2000 64 24 88 2001 80 28 108 2002 22 12 34 2003 11 19 30 2004 144 17 161 2005 139 25 164 2006 45 11 56 2007 79 15 94 2008 168 66 234 2009 146 94 240 Total 1242 372 1614

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Marcin Kocór
Analysis of Ideological Profiles of Political Parties Theoretical and Methodological Approaches

1 Introduction

Analysis of the changeability of a party system is one of the focal points of political science and political sociology. Generally, we can identify three dimensions of political party and political system dynamics: the electoral dimension, the organisational dimension and the ideological dimension. Changes of political parties in the electoral dimension are the most apparent aspect of party system dynamics. In this case, it is about diversity of support granted to parties by the voters during elections. Party dynamics in the organisational aspect includes characteristics of, for example, leadership, its structure and size of the party, as well as determining the influence of such aspects on the activities of the individual parties and the party system as a whole. By focusing on the ideological dimension of changes affecting political parties, we mean transformations of parties’ image, their approach to various political issues crucial to the voters and political parties themselves.

While organisational transformations of a political party are not always apparent to the voters, changes to the party’s ideological profile is always an important issue. Political sociology paid attention to the importance of social perception of parties’ ideological positions relatively early. According to the classic approach of Downs (1957) and Stokes (1963), political parties create their own programs – specific sets of political solutions – and offer them to the voters, thus reducing the effort needed by the electors to search for information useful when making electoral decisions. Such ideologies exist along a single left-wing – right-wing continuum which simplifies complex political issues and makes it easier to navigate in the political realm (Klingemann et al. 1994; Klingemann 1995). The aim of such simplification is to place the parties and their electorate under a category of reference similar to left-wing – right-wing division. In reality, it is often a multidimensional structure (at least two-dimensional – economic and social-cultural left and right wing) and the single left-wing – right-wing continuum is an abstract concept making it easier to evaluate the complex political reality.

In order to attract as many voters as possible, political parties modify their ideologies moving along the left-wing – right-wing continuum. The voters have their own preferences concerning political solutions, so political parties try to adjust their programs to gain as large an electorate as possible. Models of rational voting originating from Downs’ concept were developed in the 1990s in two popular approaches to voting: the spatial approach and the directional approach (Enlow, Hinich 1990; Merril, Grofman 1999; Laver 2005). Such models assume that there is a multi-dimensional space created by political issues crucial for a given society.

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In such a space, political parties occupy positions depending on solutions proposed by them. The voters, on the basis on their own priorities, evaluate the positions of various parties and vote for those that are closest to their own beliefs. A directional approach differs from the spatial approach as it assumes that the voters, while making electoral decisions, consider not the affinity towards the solutions proposed by the parties, but rather the “direction” of their programs, i.e. ways of solving specific issues. The voters compare their own preferences regarding solutions for political issues of their interest with the proposals formulated by various parties.

According to the above concepts, comparing the programs of political parties with electoral preferences makes it possible to analyse the dynamics of a political system and explain the changes in political support in a more comprehensive way. However, in my study, I am going to focus on discussing various methods of evaluating ideological profiles of political parties only. The analysis of such profiles entails some problems. The position of a given party in the ideological space is determined through the party’s attitude towards the most important political issues. Kolarska-Bobinska (2004) has noticed that parties’ programs are not entirely different. Sets of solutions proposed by political parties are similar, especially in terms of economic issues (Grabowska, Szawiel 2003, Jasiewicz 1999, Markowski 1999b). What is characteristic is the mix of left-wing and right-wing visions of politics. In the opinion of researchers, it makes the analysis of the ideological space of a party system and political realm much more difficult, yet still possible.