This article seeks to explore the nature and determinants of political conflict in European Parliament (EP) debates within the unique context of the Rule of Law Crisis (RoLC). While previous research on this topic has mainly studied the ideological dimension of this conflict, we shift focus to the affective dimension, analysing the roles of negative sentiment and motive-based criticism through a quantitative analysis of 53 hand-coded debates. We find that negativity dominates, and that this tone is adopted by Members of the EP (MEPs) irrespective of the ideological orientation or geographical origin of their national party. However, concerning levels of motive-based cynicism are primarily driven by MEPs from more right-wing, Eurosceptic and, to a lesser extent, Central and Eastern European parties. These findings suggest that the EP, an institution traditionally geared towards compromise-building, is becoming increasingly susceptible to the normative jeopardies of negative and attack politics when it comes to the RoLC.

This article reconceptualizes Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics (Xi Thought hereafter) not as a coherent doctrine but as a rhizomatic ideological formation. Drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, it treats Xi Thought as a configuration in which coherence is not presupposed but produced through the continual recombining of fragments across institutional sites. Based on an analysis of official publications, including collected works, excerpt volumes and study readers, the article shows how Xi’s speeches are disassembled and reassembled across domains such as law, economy, diplomacy and culture. These recompositions render ideology modular and resilient, allowing elements to be activated, re-weighted or sidelined without destabilizing the system as a whole. The article further argues that ideological coherence is generated through distributed and compulsory participation by Party and state actors, who are required to embed fragments of Xi Thought into institutional practice. Conceptualizing Xi Thought as a rhizome shifts analysis from doctrinal meaning to the operational logic through which ideology acquires administrative force within the Chinese party-state.

In recent elections across major destination countries in the developed world, migration has become a major issue of political salience. Japan has traditionally been an outlier to the trend, but migration did become a major topic driving public opinion in the 2025 Upper House election. This article explores the overall political salience of migration in Japan, focusing primarily on how the ruling coalition managed public discourse as it pushed through major reforms over the past decade, why it lost control of the narrative in the recent election, and what this means for the politics of migration in Japan going forward.

The paper introduces a deep‐learning model fine‐tuned for detecting authoritarian discourse in political speeches. Set up as a regression problem with weak supervision logic, the model is trained for the task of classification of segments of text for being/not being associated with authoritarian discourse. Rather than trying to define what an authoritarian discourse is, the model builds on the assumption that authoritarian leaders inherently define it. In other words, authoritarian leaders talk like authoritarians. When combined with the discourse defined by democratic leaders, the model learns the instances that are more often associated with authoritarians on the one hand and democrats on the other. The paper discusses several evaluation tests using the model and advocates for its usefulness in a broad range of research problems. It presents a new methodology for studying latent political concepts and positions as an alternative to more traditional research strategies.

In 2005, the European Parliament rejected the directive ‘on the patentability of computer‐implemented inventions’, which had been drafted and supported by the European Commission, the Council and well‐organised industrial interests, with an overwhelming majority. In this unusual case, a coalition of opponents of software patents prevailed over a strong industry‐led coalition. In this article, an explanation is developed based on political discourse showing that two stable and distinct discourse coalitions can be identified and measured over time. The apparently weak coalition of software patent opponents shows typical properties of a hegemonic discourse coalition. It presents itself as being more coherent, employs a better‐integrated set of frames and dominates key economic arguments, while the proponents of software patents are not as well‐organised. This configuration of the discourse gave leeway for an alternative course of political action by the European Parliament. The notion of discourse coalitions and related structural features of the discourse are operationalised by drawing on social network analysis. More specifically, discourse network analysis is introduced as a new methodology for the study of policy debates. The approach is capable of measuring empirical discourses both statically and in a longitudinal way, and is compatible with the policy network approach.

This article provides the contextual background to the symposium on Populist Discourses and Political Communication in Southern Europe. It explains the symposium’s objectives and introduces the rationale of its articles on Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain. Within this context, the editors also highlight the specific conditions for the emergence of typical forms of Southern European populism, as well as its distinctive features, focusing on the challenges populism poses to politics and media research. The implications of the phenomenon for the future of the European project are also addressed.

The article explores the energy security relations of the European Union with the Russian Federation through the prism of the political discourse. It identifies key formations and topics related to the concept of security. Drawing on a detailed discourse analysis of 339 statements, interviews, speeches, press releases, and documents produced by EU political leaders and institutions, the article focuses on (a) the basic themes of EU political discourse on the energy security relations with Russia and (b) the perception of Russia by the European Union. The majority of the documents used in the article come from 2010 to 2019, the period of the second Barroso Commission and the Juncker Commission. At the theoretical level, the article is focused on the relationship between the main concept, political discourse, and security.

Portuguese politics and mainstream media have been resistant to the recent spread of populism. This article examines the specific features of Portuguese politics and media that might explain the apparent exception, and puts it to test by analysing the prevalence of populist discourses and styles of communication in different types of online media. The sample is composed of mediated and unmediated messages on immigration and corruption, two issues that are commonly present in populist discourses by both right- and left-wing political actors. Overall, the content analysis shows that although populist discourses are not recurrent in politics and media, social media have amplified the visibility of this kind of discourses in Portugal.

Metaphors, arguments and emotional appeals have considerable persuasive power in political discourse, yet they are rarely studied together. To explore the interactions between these interrelated phenomena, we employ three methods of analysis: Metaphor Identification Procedure, Inference Anchoring Theory, and lexicon-based sentiment analysis. Our data come from Polish political debates broadcasted during the 2019 pre-election campaign. We test hypotheses about the frequency of the associations between metaphors, arguments and emotional appeals. Hypothesis 1 predicts that arguments containing metaphors are more frequent than arguments without metaphors, hypothesis 2 predicts that arguments containing emotional appeals are more frequent than arguments without them, and hypothesis 3 predicts that arguments with metaphors and emotional appeals are more frequent than any other combination. The results show that metaphorical arguments do not outnumber non-metaphorical ones (H1 is falsified), and arguments that are both metaphorical and emotional do not outnumber the sum of all other types (H3 is falsified). Emotional arguments are more common than non-emotional ones (H2 is verified). We suggest that when political actors articulate their arguments, they often choose a particular metaphor to evoke positive or negative emotions in their audience.

During the Late Classic (a.d. 600–900), Maya stone monuments from the Western Lowlands documented people with the sajal title. This position was associated with corporate group leaders who acted as governors of secondary sites, supervised warfare-related activities, and manufactured and distributed goods. The increase in records, along with the elaboration of monuments by sajals with differing narratives from those of the rulers, has been identified as a contributing factor to the regional political instability that led to the abandonment of Classic Maya capitals. This article aims to analyze monuments from the political spheres of Yaxchilan, Piedras Negras, and Palenque using a discourse analysis approach to identify the discursive strategies sajals used to showcase and strengthen their hierarchical positions. To accomplish this, I will analyze the discourse in relation to the intermediality of monuments to examine how sajals rivaled the rulers of these cities. Additionally, I will explore the correlation between these discourses and the sociopolitical transformations that preceded the regional collapse in the ninth century a.d.