The Disrupting Effect of Focusing Events on Immigration Discourse in the U.S. and U.K.
An Automated Discourse Network Analysis
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 24225664 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Heather Harper (0000-0002-0206-517X, New Mexico State University), Cybele Kappos (University of California System), Stefanie Neumeier (University of Southern California) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Pages | 1-27 |
| Publication date | 2026-10-10 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Sociological Focus (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0038-0237 • E-ISSN: 2162-1128 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/00380237.2026.2626859 |
| OpenAlex | W7221339010 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 24 |
In this article, we develop events-based discourse network analysis (EDNA),an automated approach combining event analysis, topic modeling, and network analysis to identify changes in political discourse over time. This article makes two main contributions. Methodologically, EDNA automates the labor-intensive manual coding required by traditional discourse network analysis while centering analysis around events, enabling efficient comparison of discourse networks across time. Theoretically, this scalability allows us to systematically demonstrate—across 14 cases—that focusing events consistently restructure legislative discourse networks, a pattern previously difficult to establish empirically. Applying EDNA to U.K. parliamentary and U.S. congressional immigration speeches (1975 to 2020), we find that focusing events disrupt discourse communities in two forms: communities either become more cohesive or more dispersed. We illustrate these contrasting patterns through two exemplary cases: the 1993 Golden Venture Ship Grounding and the 2000 Dover lorry deaths. After Golden Venture, legislator discourse communities became more cohesive and interconnected; after Dover, communities became less dense and more dispersed. The mechanisms underlying these divergent outcomes warrant future theoretical investigation. Beyond policy discourse, EDNA provides a scalable and replicable framework for studying social movements, media narratives, and cultural evolution—offering an efficient method for examining relational patterns within large corpora.
British Parliament · discourse communities · focusing events · immigration discourse · Immigration policy · parliamentary speeches · United States Congress · Computational and Text Analysis Methods · Cultural and political discourse analysis · Migration, Refugees, and Integration
Mapping the ideological networks of American climate politics
STM
A Comparative Analysis of Community Detection Algorithms on Artificial Networks
Examining risk and crisis communications of government agencies and stakeholders during early-stages of Covid-19 on Twitter
A puzzle concerning triads in social networks
Talking about tax
Focusing on Focusing Events
An advocacy coalition framework of policy change and the role of policy-oriented learning therein
Structural Topic Models for Open‐Ended Survey Responses
Reconceptualizing Major Policy Change in the Advocacy Coalition Framework
Focusing Events, Mobilization, and Agenda Setting
The Discourse of Globalization
Who Leads? Who Follows? Measuring Issue Attention and Agenda Setting by Legislators and the Mass Public Using Social Media Data
Cultural Idioms and Political Ideologies in the Revolutionary Reconstruction of State Power
Ideologies and Social Revolutions
Orders of discourse
Follow Me Too
Toward a Historicized Sociology
Understanding the Dialectic of Discourse and Collective Action
| Highly cited | No |
|---|