Justifications for Anti-Refugee Views in German Political Discourse Over Time: Parallel, Changing, and Expanding Boundaries of the ‘Sayable’

The project will conduct a critical discourse analysis (CDA), following a Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) developed by Ruth Wodak. Critical approaches view the construction of social reality as discursive and consider discourses to be imbued with power and interest considerations. According to this view, discourses shape reality, social practices, and even the identities of individuals in ways that perpetuate or counteract existing power structures.

Heuristically, DHA works along five questions: 1. How are persons, objects, processes, and actions named and referred to linguistically?; 2. What characteristics, qualities, and features are attributed to social actors, objects, phenomena, and processes?; 3. What arguments are employed?; 4. From what perspective are these attributions and arguments expressed?; and 5. Are the respective utterances articulated openly; are they intensified or mitigated? (ibid., 93f). These questions will structure the data analysis.