My PhD research analysed use of ‘economy’ in NZ’s parliamentary debates using a 57-million-word corpus of New Zealand parliamentary discourse developed during the project. My research quantified a large increase in discussion of the economy after the 2008 financial crisis and differences in the responses of New Zealand political parties.
This research also identified and quantified the shared vocabulary of the major parties, National and Labour, when talking about the economy and the Greens’ divergence from the major parties’ prioritisation of economic growth.
I developed a technique I called ‘key collocates analysis’ to identify shifts in collocated words over time, allowing me to analyse common features of rhetoric of the economy and specific rhetorical strategies being used by political parties. I’ve drawn on this research since my PhD in publications on NZ’s political parties and the Greens. Analysis was conducted using a corpus analysis tool built for the project (Political Language Browser).
Skills & Tools: Corpus-assisted discourse analysis; Keyword analysis; Collocation analysis; Web application development; PHP/MySQL/Javascript.