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Normative Concepts Analysis: Unpacking the Language of Legitimation

Uriel Abulof, uabulof@princeton.edu

** Post-Refereeing Version (final draft). Click here for the journal version **

ABSTRACT

How should we study the language of political legitimation? Incipient

scholarship increasingly seeks to bridge the conceptual schism

between the sociological is and the philosophical ought in the study of

legitimacy, looking at public legitimating discourses to uncover the

actual social attitudes toward prescriptive principles. And while this

research agenda has recently gained traction, its methodology remains

opaque. This paper suggests that normative concepts, central to the

argumentations that hold common basic beliefs and discourse

together, can allow us to tap into the language of legitimation.

Normative concepts can be traced via mixed methods research,

incorporating the quantitative method of corpus linguistics and the

qualitative method of discourse-tracing—two techniques that mutually

enrich and complement each other. By illuminating changes in the

sort, scale, and scope of normative concepts, this mode of inquiry can

explicate the language of legitimation and advance our understanding

of sociopolitical legitimacy.

Key words: Legitimation, Public Political Thought, Normative Concepts Analysis, Political Discourse, Corpus Linguistics, Discourse-Tracing

Length: 7850 words, 31 pages

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Introduction

Why? This question drives social sciences: why war, poverty and that political party

rather than another? But asking “why?” is, of course, not the prerogative of social scientists;

social actors, endowed with reflexivity, do it too (Archer 2012). And when they pose the

question in the public sphere regarding political questions, and reason their answers,

legitimation through language transpires. Answers vary, and so does their rationale. People

often resort to practical reasoning—“we do this because it is worthwhile”—but occasionally

reason actions through prescriptive principles: “we ought to do this because it is worthy; it is

the right thing to do.” The latter, writ large, constitutes “public political thought” (PPT): the

public moral reasoning of politics. This fusion of the philosophical ought and the sociological

is in the study of political legitimacy has become a focal point for a burgeoning scholarship

(Barker 2001; Bjola and Kornprobst 2011; Cap 2011; Crawford 2002; Goddard 2010; Kettell

2012; Schmidt 2008; Steffek 2003).

Studying PPT via the language of legitimation is a daunting task. This paper seeks to

aid it by laying out a comprehensive blueprint of the field’s tenets and methodology: research

strategies, methods, research plan and the research process. I suggest unpacking the language

of legitimation through normative concepts analysis (NOCA). Normative concepts are not

merely informative but appraisive; they ascribe a certain moral value to politics, directly

signifying, or indirectly alluding to, prescriptive principles. Human rights, happiness, peace,

prosperity, security, self-defense, and God—these are but few of the many normative

(legitimating and delegitimating) concepts that have come to play an important role in shaping

modern politics.

NOCA regards these concepts as “tapping points” into language of legitimation. This

paper outlines NOCA in four stages. First, I propose to locate legitimation via NOCA’s three

main tasks of ascertaining the normative concepts’ sort, scale, and scope, and propose that to

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aid both theory generation and empirical investigation, NOCA should employ abductive and

retroductive research strategies (Blaikie 2010; Glaser and Strauss 1968; Ong 2011). Second, I

detail NOCA’s methods. I propose to combine corpus linguistics and discourse-tracing across

time, a mixed methods research (Creswell and Plano Clark 2011) akin to Modern Diachronic

Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (MD-CADS; Partington 2010b). Third, I outline NOCA’s

research plan and process, from establishing the research questions, through data selection

and data collection, to data analysis and interpretation. The paper is largely theoretical, but

provides ample examples, taken partly from my own work.

Qualitative: Discourse-Tracing Quantitative: Corpus Linguistics Modern Diachronic Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies

Normative Concepts Analysis

Scale: Extent and Intensity

Figure 1 - Normative Concepts Analysis: Unpacking the Language of Legitimation

Research Questions: What does A believe to legitimate P?

Who legitimates P, why and how? * A = social actor/s; P = politics in question

Research Strategies: Abduction (description)

Retroduction (explanation) Exploration

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I. Research Strategies

How should we study political legitimacy? In a way, we shouldn’t. PPT focuses not on

legitimacy per se but on legitimation (and delegitimation)—the process of legitimacy-making

(and unmaking) (Barker 2001: 7ff). Political legitimacy is elusive but political legitimation is

discernible. This section disaggregates the task of tracing the language of legitimation through

normative concepts, and delineates the key research strategies employed to pursue it.

“Triangulating” Legitimation

PPT is driven by two complementary puzzles: “What do social actors believe to

legitimate politics?” and: “Who (de)legitimates politics, why, and how?” To answer these

quandaries, we should “triangulate” legitimation by ascertaining its sort, scale, and scope.

Sort signifies the types of legitimation in use (What kind of legitimation?); scale signifies the

extent and intensity of legitimation (What is being legitimated and to what degree?); scope

signifies the societal prevalence of the various legitimating efforts (Who is legitimating?).

Locating legitimation along sort, scale, and scope allows us to establish the space in which

legitimation transpires and—when appended with a fourth, temporal, dimension—determine

its dynamic direction. In its most comprehensive form, the study of PPT not only describes

these heterogeneous dynamics but also accounts for it and explores its practical implications.

PPT is primarily analyzed via the language of legitimation, made of arguments

(involving speaker and largely passive audience) and deliberations (communicative

argumentation, involving two or more active speakers). Legitimacy is not caused, but created,

and tracing the public dialectical deliberations on the moral reasoning of politics can reveal

why and how. Analyzing the language of legitimation walks the middle way of “explication,”

between objective explanation and intersubjective, interpretive understanding (Larsen 1997).

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Among the diverse discursive lenses for capturing PPT, conceptual history (Koselleck

2002; Skinner 1998) and concepts analysis (Ball et al. 1989; Williams 1985) provide a

promising path. Normative political concepts are especially pivotal for studying PPT. They

are not merely informative but appraisive, either directly signifying, or indirectly alluding to,

prescriptive values and principles, often conjoining factual and moral views of what is “right.”

Normative concepts are neither static nor uniform, but dynamic and heterogeneous, often

changing meanings in different contexts.

In order to detect legitimation via language, normative concepts analysis (NOCA)

seeks to ascertain the sort, scale, and scope of the dynamic public usage of normative

concepts: Sort refers to the types of political legitimation to which the concepts allude. Scale

refers to the normative concepts’ extent (object of legitimation; mainly identity, polity,

authority and policy) and intensity (directions and degrees of contestation). Scope signifies

both the concepts’ salience (how noticeable they are in the public discourse) and their

resonance (to what extent they “reverberate” in the public sphere via related concepts and

beliefs). Sort, scale and scope naturally intertwine. Social acceptance of the normative

concept is partly driven, and at times also drive, the type, extent, and intensity of legitimation

the concept seems to aid.

Abduction

Abduction is a fitting strategy for exploring and describing PPT because it addresses a

key quandary of PPT research: Should we conceptualize the discourse of legitimation in the

lay language of social actors or the technical language of scholars? On the one hand, PPT is

all about public thought and talk; on the other hand, total “integrity with the phenomenon” is

neither feasible nor desirable for scholarship, especially for theory generation (Winch 1990).

Abduction suggests how to balance these two considerations. It posits that analyzing

social conduct is incipiently predicated on “the hermeneutic task of penetrating the frames of

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meaning which lay actors themselves draw upon in constituting and reconstituting the social

world” (Giddens 1993: 163). Abduction thus “incorporates what the Inductive and Deductive

research strategies ignore—the meanings and interpretations, the motives and intentions, that

people use in their everyday lives, and which direct their behavior—and elevates them to the

central place in social theory and research” (Blaikie 2010: 89; Ong 2011).

Centrality, however, is not exclusivity. Indeed, the very notion of abduction points to

“moving from lay descriptions of social life, to technical descriptions of that social life” by

the “iterative process of immersion in these social worlds and reflection on what is

discovered” (Blaikie 2010: 90, 91). Hence, NOCA does work not with “definitive concepts,”

but rather with “sensitizing concepts,” which suggests possible directions that are explored by

rigorous “bottom-up” hermeneutics (Denzin 2009). We should aim at optimal correspondence

between the “lay language of legitimation” and its academic conceptualization, so that our

scholarly “constructs of the second degree”—our “ideal types”—resonate with those first-

order constructs “made by the actors on the social scene” (Schutz 1982: 59) enough that the

social actors could recognize themselves in the scholarly accounts.

For example, to learn whether and how the Chinese legitimate the apparent

contradiction between communist authority and its semi-capitalist policy we should immerse

ourselves in the Chinese language of legitimation, especially the normative concepts Chinese

themselves use to perform this legitimation. But we should also be able to “abduct” such

prevalent Chinese concepts as “mandate of Heaven” (tian ming) and “rule by virtue” (ren zhi)

to sort them in pertinent ideal-types.

Retroduction

While abduction focuses on exploration and description, it could also aid explanation.

Abductive strategy’s emphasis on “thick” (contextualized) hermeneutics of everyday accounts

allows better “understanding” of the features and force of the moral structures and agential

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motivations (reasons) behind social actions. However, causal explanation is more clearly

provided by the retroductive strategy (abduction and retroduction are in fact often conflated;

Haig 2005).

Retroduction draws on the realist approach to social science (Bhaskar 2008; Maccarini

et al. 2011; Varela and Harre 1996). It starts with the explanandum, an empirical puzzle,

informed by either induction or abduction, and then “uses creative imagination and analogy to

work back from data to an explanation” (Blaikie 2010: 19). Unlike the hypothetico-deductive

strategy’s emphasis on hypothesis testing (usually via quantitative methods), retroduction’s

hypothetical mechanisms go beyond observations of regularities in the empirical domain to

uncover possible causal mechanisms in the real domain. Retroductive explanation entails a

contextual causal complex, which precludes prediction and may not be directly observed,

often incorporating INUS, that is, insufficient but non-redundant part of an unnecessary but

sufficient condition (Mackie 1974: 62)

In retroduction, we account for the explanandum, which itself may involve

regularities, by postulating possible generative mechanisms, the changing circumstances of

their operation (context), and the actual triggering conditions (Blaikie 2010: 87-89; Peirce

1992: 46-49, 53-56, 441). This contextual causal complex can then be tested, comparing

competing hypothetical mechanisms, via empirical evidence (Sayer 2010). Within realism,

NOCA is closer to Harre’s (1994) ethogenic thesis of discursive realism, and thus its

empirical evidence is largely derived from the social actors’ discourses as revealing ascribed

meanings and beliefs. Importantly, while realist scholars often shy away from quantitative

analysis (cf. Pawson 1989), corpus linguistics (discussed below) can greatly enrich our

understanding of the possible causal mechanisms that underline social reality, and thus further

cultivate the common ground of realism and constructionism (Elder-Vass 2012).

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Exploration

Since PPT is an emergent field, theorization is nascent. Before we can undertake any

substantial theory-testing in describing and explaining PPT’s nature and dynamics, extensive

theory-generation is still required. What makes a public shift in its basic values and beliefs?

(Abramson and Inglehart 1995). Can such a change be manipulated by leaders? (Mcgraw

1998). When and how does a legitimacy crisis transpire? (Reus-Smit 2007). These are largely

open questions. This profoundly exploratory nature of current PPT research lends itself to

approaches such as “adaptive theory” (Layder 1998), which constructs a dialogical bridge

between theory-generation approaches, such as grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss 1968)

and theory-testing.

PPT’s exploratory core is not an excuse to forgo fallibilism. PPT research cannot, for

now, engage in substantial refutation (methodological falsification) as practiced in the

hypothetico-deductive model. However, PPT research—via NOCA—could, and should, allow

for plausible refutation of its theses (epistemic falsifiability), “specifying precisely the

conditions under which one is willing to give up one’s position” (Lakatos 1970: 92). For

example, if we submit that in the last generation Turkish PPT has increasingly recoiled

against Kemalist political legitimation, thereby engendering a nationwide legitimation crisis,

we should stipulate potentially refuting evidence—for instance, that certain Kemalist

normative concepts, like “laicism” (laiklik), have actually retained both their societal saliency

and positive appraisal. In the next section I consider how such evidence might present itself.

II. Methods

Studying PPT via NOCA takes the “linguistic turn” in the study of political

legitimation, drawing less on behavior and public opinion polls (Kaase and Newton 1995) and

more on discourse. It joins in the burgeoning scholarship that probes political legitimation

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through language (Barker 2001; Crawford 2002; Goddard 2010; Kettell 2012; Schmidt 2008;

Steffek 2003).

The abductive research strategy typically employs qualitative methods of discourse

analysis, but this need not be exclusive. As I show below, mixed methods research (Creswell

and Plano Clark 2011) offers distinct benefits for analyzing PPT, drawing on both corpus

linguistics and discourse-tracing. I first present each method and then discuss the merits of

using them together.

Corpus Linguistics

Modern corpus linguistics is “the study of language based on examples of real life

language use” (Mcenery and Wilson 2001: 1). It utilizes corpora—large and carefully chosen

collections of digitized texts representing a particular natural language variety—in order to

uncover linguistic patterns of change and continuity.

Somewhat overlapping with content analysis, particularly in compiling word

frequency lists (Simon and Xenos 2004), corpus linguistics typically utilizes much larger

corpora, allowing it to also investigate other statistically significant lexical patterns (O'keeffe

and Mccarthy 2010): dispersion (the spread and position of particular terms in a text);

concordances (the context that terms occur in; KWIC); collocations (terms frequently

occurring near each other); sentiment analysis (Liu 2012); and topic models (Blei 2012).

Corpus linguistics informs the incipient “culturomics”: that is, the study of human culture

through the collection and analysis of extensive computed data, including digitized books

(Michel and Aiden 2011) and news archives (Leetaru 2011).

Advanced computation and the information revolution have greatly boosted the

usefulness, applicability, and acceptability of corpus linguistics (Mcenery and Hardie 2012).

While it may overstate the case to argue that “the ability to analyze vast amounts of text

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quickly and cheaply has the potential to revolutionize the study of politics” (Schonhardt-

Bailey 2005: 703), corpus linguistics definitely holds great promise for the field (Monroe and

Schrodt 2008).

The features of corpus linguistics are beneficial for studying PPT via NOCA. The

latter is about what societies actually think, say, and write about political principles, and how

this changes over time. Corpus linguistics provides valuable cues on these distinct objects of

inquiry. Its corpora can contain voluminous discursive data, pertaining to the talk and text

among the public. Its emphasis on natural language provides access to how people actually

discuss politics. Its digital features enable discerning those unique concepts, principles, and

beliefs that are particularly pivotal in the public discourse and to further probe their ascribed

meanings. And its capacity for careful diachronic and cross-sectional analysis of linguistic

patterns allow for comparatively tracing the evolving language of legitimation and its

prominent concepts. Dynamic topic models are particularly helpful in conducting diachronic

corpus linguistics. They allow us to mine a corpus for latent topics (probabilistic patterns of

word use), in order to “find an underlying theme of the collection and track how it has

changed over time” (Blei 2012: 82).

For example, corpus linguistics of Israeli discourse (covering newspapers, electronic

media, and speeches) would readily reveal the prominence of public talk and text on

“existential threats / dangers.” Such corpus should moreover reveal, via diachronic word

frequency, the changing societal salience of this discourse; to discern, via dispersion, who are

the agents of this discourse (the speakers); and to trace, via concordances and collocations, the

changing meanings of these “threats” (what is threatening what?) and how they are framed to

legitimate polity, authority, policy, and identity.

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Discourse-Tracing

While leveraging the ever-more efficient ways to quantitatively analyze “text as data,”

NOCA concurs that “for automated text methods to become a standard tool for political

scientists, methodologists must contribute new methods and new methods of validation”

(Grimmer and Stewart 2013). Complementing corpus linguistics’ quantitative input is the

qualitative insight of discourse-tracing. The latter is the marriage of selective elements from

discourse analysis techniques to provide for systemic and historically informed hermeneutics

(Ish-Shalom 2006; Legreco and Tracy 2009). Discourse-tracing seeks to learn about society

through language, not the other way around. It follows the interpretive path, which is nicely

captured by Pouliot’s (2010: 51-91) “sobjectivism,” starting from “immersing oneself in

practical life-worlds,” through contextualizing meanings (via discourse analysis), to

historicizing them.

Discourse-tracing’s contribution to studying PPT lies in its emphasis on agents and

their argumentative strategies. First, discourse-tracing uncovers speakers and their socio-

political context. After all, “discourse is not just ideas or ‘text’ (what is said) but also context

(where, when, how, and why it was said). The term refers not only to structure (what is said,

or where and how) but also to agency (who said what to whom)” (Schmidt 2008: 305). In

particular, discourse-tracing shares the premise of critical discourse analysis that “language

indexes power, expresses power, is involved where there is contention over and a challenge to

power” (Wodak and Meyer 2009: 6, 10). Indeed, power has an impact on agents’ capacities

and intentions, inter alia in the normative sphere. This, however, does not mean that “morality

is the product of power” (Carr 2001 [1939]: 63). Might makes right, and vice versa. Power

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can boost a speaker’s capacity to persuasively argue and legitimate; but doing the right thing,

and arguing for it, may likewise augment an actor’s power (Krebs and Jackson 2007).1

Second, discourse-tracing also analyzes argumentations to detect the main strategies of

legitimation they employ (Cap 2008; Crawford 2002; Reyes 2011; Van Leeuwen 2008: 105-

123; Wodak 2001). Operating within the discourse-historical approach (DHA, a stream within

critical discourse analysis), discourse-tracing uncovers evolving discursive strategies,

“adopted to achieve a particular social, political, psychological or linguistic goal” (Wodak

2011: 49). It detects the arguments that constitute these discursive strategies and explores how

they relate to each other and how their content evolves in light of their speakers’ positions and

changing socio-historical context (Goddard 2010; Reisigl and Wodak 2009).

Discourse-tracing further analyzes how legitimating arguments (as used by

legitimating agents) go beyond empty rhetorical structures (Aristotle’s topoï koinoï).

Legitimating argumentations often employ normative concepts and draw, either implicitly or

explicitly, on both general beliefs, which are seemingly shared by all men, and more context-

specific justificatory beliefs. Discourse-tracing qualitatively exposes and explores this matrix

of justificatory beliefs and discourse.

For example, discourse-tracing the arguments made to justify the US 2003 invasion of

Iraq construes five main strategies of legitimation: Saddam Hussein’s evil character, Iraqi

program of WMD, Iraqi sponsorship of terror, a clash of civilizations (and religions), and

democracy promotion. Beyond identifying these strategies, discourse-tracing also aids in

establishing the linkage between various speakers and the strategies they employed, as well as

1 Conducting discourse-tracing may, but need not, be driven by the attempt to uncover “the

way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and

talk in the social and political context” (Van Dijk 2003: 352). A position of engaged neutrality is

equally valid for ethically driving and informing discourse-tracing, and is one which I prefer.

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their evolution and socio-political context. It may further establish the normative concepts

used throughout this discourse and how they relate to each other and to pertinent justificatory

beliefs. For example, the democracy-promotion legitimating strategy, while relying heavily on

the concept of “democratic peace,” implies an axiological scale that effectively posits peace

and security before liberalism and democracy.

Modern Diachronic Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (MD-CADS)

While corpus linguistics and discourse-tracing often seem to constitute “two

solitudes,” they need not be divorced (Hardy et al. 2004). Indeed, “the distinction between

objective quantification and subjective interpretation begins to blur when the analysis covers a

large number of texts,” which is often necessary for studying politics (Fierke 2004: 37).

Moreover, corpus linguistics and discourse-tracing are not only compatible, but complement

each other, allowing for both triangulation and falsifiability (Fierke 2004; Hardy et al. 2004;

Neuendorf 2004).

The manifest utility of corpus linguistics has encouraged a growing number of

scholars to employ it in various related fields, particularly sociolinguistics and discourse

analysis. This synthesis, which is often termed “corpus-assisted discourse studies” (CADS), is

gaining considerable traction (Ädel and Reppen 2008; Baker 2010; Charles et al. 2009;

Mcenery and Wilson 2001; Partington 2010b; Partington et al. 2004), including in political

science (Morley and Bayley 2009; Schonhardt-Bailey 2005). Further enriching CADS is the

study of its “modern diachronic” (MD) dimension. This incipient research program employs

large corpora of a parallel structure and content from different moments of contemporary time

in order to track changes in modern language usage, as well as social, cultural and political

changes as they are reflected in this language (Partington 2010a: 83).

MS-CADS provides not only with the distinct merits of its two constituting methods,

but also with the benefits of their complementarity. This mixture helps to offset the

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weaknesses inherent within one method with the strengths of the other method. In terms of

ascertaining the sort, scale, and scope of normative concepts, discourse-tracing is especially

apt to the first task, while corpus linguistics has much more to tell about scope; scale can be

inferred by both methods, albeit from their distinct perspectives. Corpus linguistics has a

unique capacity to uncover diachronic changes in the normative concepts’ societal salience.

This asset is best harnessed by a varied and voluminous corpus; the longer the period and the

more authors and genres it encompasses, the more it can reveal. Discourse-tracing may say

fairly little about the diachronic societal scope of the normative concepts, but can go much

deeper than corpus linguistics in ascertaining the concepts’ sort.

Corpus linguistics is particularly useful for revealing empirical puzzles. Word

frequencies often expose surprising trends in the societal salience of normative concepts,

bringing to the fore intriguing questions. Corpus linguistics can also falsify/validate

interpretive claims (2004; Bennett and Elman 2007: 188-189) and boost the findings’

reliability through reproducibility, which qualitative discourse analysis typically lacks

(Neuendorf 2004: 34). Complementarily, discourse-tracing is particularly apt for finding and

unpacking agential motivations (reasons), and can also help to qualitatively validate the

corpus’ findings.

For example, a PPT/NOCA study that starts with the ambitious task of finding out

“What legitimates the international system?” might settle (as discussed below) with focusing

on one of its legitimating principles and key normative concepts: the self-determination of

peoples. Extensive corpus linguistics then reveals a puzzling finding: Western discourse on

self-determination has been on a continuous and sharp decline in the last generation. We can

then suggest contextual causal mechanisms, such as changing linguistic “fashions,” or the

increasing self-evidence of national self-determination. Corpus linguistics would then reveal

that self-determination’s collocates (such as autonomy, self-government, etc.) have likewise

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declined, thus challenging the “changing fashion” explanation. Discourse-tracing can

complementarily suggest whether and how self-determination has been decontested (e.g. by

detecting whether its explicit evocation elicits dispute). It may also identify major powers

with vested interest in “taming” self-determination (containing its potentially explosive

potential), and hermeneutically analyze the discursive strategies they employ to that end: for

instance, by insisting that it should not subvert states’ territorial integrity. Such taming

strategies possibly diminished self-determination’s appeal to national movements, thus

engendering, at least temporarily, its decline in discourse.

III. Research Plan and Process

Any design of PPT/NOCA should obviously be tailored to the specific investigation.

Still, beyond the core research strategies and the methods employed, some guidelines are

useful in planning the study.

Mixed methods research comes in various forms, diverging along implementation (the

sequence of conducting the quantitative/qualitative phases), priority (relative importance

assigned to the methods), and integration (when and to what end the quantitative and

qualitative data are combined—collection, analysis, or interpretation). NOCA would typically

follow the “concurrent triangulation design,” in which both methods are used simultaneously

throughout the research and assigned about equal importance, and their distinct results are

integrated interpretively (Creswell et al. 2010).

The exploratory strategy of PPT/NOCA suggests a nonlinear research plan. Instead of

following a fixed sequence of steps, NOCA typically involves as constant interplay between

its main tasks. The leading research questions and the contextual causal mechanisms come

first, but the subsequent phases of data selection, collection, analysis, and interpretation are

not chronologically separated. Instead, these phases (or tasks) are conducted in an ongoing

dialectics until they arrive at a thesis saturation point—that is, until a relatively stable

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conclusion is reached. This is when further empirical evidence no longer amends the

hypothesis-turn-thesis. I proceed now to explicate the main phases, briefly illustrated by

NOCA of the Arab Spring.

Research Questions

PPT study starts with an empirical puzzle: “What do social actors believe legitimates

politics?” Its flipside, “Who (de)legitimates politics, why, and how?” can be broken into four

key queries: To what extent does this (de)legitimation occur? What social actors use it? In

what ways do they use it? Why do they use it? Notably, only the last, emphasizing causality,

invites the use of retroduction. The study then involves preliminary immersion in the subject

matter by gathering initial sample data from both primary and secondary sources and drawing

on imagination and previous knowledge to suggest contextual causal mechanisms.

Using this springboard, PPT study proceeds to NOCA: identifying and analyzing

pertinent normative concepts so as to gradually situate them in the diachronic “3d-matrix” of

sort, scale, and scope. At first, all possible concepts are registered, possibly by using dynamic

topic models; even if a concept occurs only a few times in the initial sample, this is sufficient

reason to include it within this evolving matrix. Upon identifying potential key concepts, the

researcher needs to decide whether to proceed investigating the original “jumpstarting” puzzle

or to rephrase it so as to focus on a single concept and the distinctive puzzle it presents. Both

research paths are equally valid, and the choice is usually up to the scholar’s own inclinations

and limitations. Note, however, that the researcher might be required to reduce the original

puzzle, due to its ambitious goal, to a more descriptive analysis, whereas it should be easier to

extend the second, more limited, research question to account for change and to probe

implications.

For example, we can begin our inquiry by asking “What do New Zealanders believe to

legitimate their ‘open door’ policy?’” and “Who is legitimating the ‘open door’ policy, to

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what end, and how?” Initial probing into the pertinent discourses, drawing on both corpus

linguistics and discourse-tracing, may reveal that those who believe in “open door” (itself a

normative concept) tend to employ the concepts of charity, multiculturalism, prosperity, and

cosmopolitanism. The researcher could then either continue to pursue the original research

question through NOCA of all these concepts, or else focus on one of them, rephrasing the

research question accordingly (e.g. “Why and how has ‘multiculturalism’ come to legitimate

‘open door’ policy in New Zealand?”), possibly appending it with inquiries regarding

implications.

Data Selection

The choice of data for both the quantitative and qualitative corpora is driven by the

specific research question. The main delimiting criteria for data selection are time, language,

authorship, and genre. Regarding time, since NOCA traces diachronic political legitimation,

and since political legitimacy does not typically change on a public scale in a matter of days

and weeks, its corpora should span months, and, more often, years. Regarding language,

beyond prescribing immersion in the natural language of legitimation, NOCA preferably

draws on its original language as well. While relying on translation is not essential for

studying PPT, it is best avoided, or at least complemented by basic knowledge of the original

language.

Regarding authorship, studying political legitimation does not mean examining

discourses of professional politicians exclusively. Utterances relating to public affairs,

whether official or unofficial, written by academics, voiced in the media, or spoken publicly

by elites or ordinary citizens are all potentially valid for examining political discourse

(Hansen 2006: 49-82). Still, when focusing on legitimating governmental policies, we should

give prime concern to the discourses of ideationally/materially powerful agents—those best

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positioned to shape and legitimate these policies—while paying close attention to how these

agents attempt to legitimate themselves as authorities in the eyes of others.

Regarding genre, NOCA should track typical texts within relevant genres (Neumann

2008: 65-70), and, depending on the puzzle, it might be useful to treat secondary sources as

primary, incorporating academic books and articles. The rationale for this lies in “a mutual

interpretative interplay between social science and those whose activities compose its subject

matter—a double hermeneutic” (Giddens 1984: xxxii). As we study society, our analytical

concepts, and interpretations thereof, often permeate society itself, becoming part of the

public discourse—thus rendering relevant the analysis of academic conceptualization. It is, in

effect, the collapse of Popper’s (1979: 108) third world of objective (and “subject-less”)

world into the second, subjective (or rather inter-subjective) world.

Data Collection

A key conundrum in PPT data collection is whether to compile and use the same

corpus for both corpus linguistics and discourse-tracing. While a shared corpus has merits, it

is often impractical: first, discourse-tracing cannot reasonably encompass the extensive

volume of textual data involved with corpus linguistics; second, discourses that are

particularly valuable for discourse-tracing do not always lend themselves to quantitative

compilation (especially computation and digital coding). Separate corpora also boost

triangulation, as they provide not only distinct and comparable lenses but distinct and

comparable data on the same subject (Denzin 2009: 297-313).

When compiling the discrete corpora for both methods it is important to keep in mind

their distinctive merits, discussed above. Corpus linguistics has a unique capacity to uncover

diachronic changes in the societal salience of normative concepts. This asset is best harnessed

by a varied and voluminous corpus; the longer the period and the more authors and genres it

encompasses, the more it can reveal. Discourse-tracing may say fairly little about the societal

19

scope of the normative concepts, but it can go much deeper than corpus linguistics in

ascertaining their sort. Researchers can more effectively undertake these qualitative tasks

using relatively few representative and especially informative texts: that is, discourses of

high-profile speakers in moments of acute normative dilemmas (usually times of political

crises) that seem to embody both justificatory belief and discourse via pertinent normative

concepts.

The modes for collecting the relevant discursive data obviously depend on the sources.

There are several readily available modern diachronic corpora (such as the British National

Corpus, Corpus of Historical American English, TIME Magazine Corpus of American

English, and Google Books), which are comprehensive and well structured. Diachronic non-

English corpora are less prevalent but are continuously being developed. Corpora can also be

(and, depending on the research question, may have to be) developed by the researcher Digital

archives of media and social media, books, blogs, articles, and increasingly sophisticated

software allow unprecedented possibilities for developing dedicated corpora that capture

natural language on a mass scale. Gathering the corpus of the discourse-tracing is more

traditionally executed through trial-and-error examination of potentially relevant texts.

Fortunately, the quantitative and qualitative collections typically facilitate each other, pointing

to most pertinent discourses. Topic models can help constructing the qualitative corpus by

ranking the text units according to the extent to which they refer to the relevant topics.

Data Analysis and Interpretation

NOCA’s hermeneutic process is geared towards language’s normative content and

political context. Because of this emphasis on normative concepts and their role in

argumentation and deliberation, structural and formal linguistic elements—such as style,

grammar, figurativeness, and idioms—are important only to the extent they bear on that

normative content (Eemeren and Grootendorst 2004).

20

At the descriptive level, NOCA means analyzing and interpreting the collected

corpora in order to establish the sort, scale, and scope of the normative concepts. Researchers

can sort the concepts according to existent typologies of legitimating argumentations, such as

authority, moral, or rationalization (Van Leeuwen 2008: 105-123), but they may well explore

new typologies. Scaling the concepts according to the pertinent legitimation’s extent and

intensity is usefully achieved by locating the object of legitimation and its warrants, probing

specific topoi: like danger, justice, responsibility, comfort (Wodak 2001). Finally, the

researcher can analyze the concepts’ salience and resonance (scope) through careful

diachronic corpus linguistics, contextualized via dispersion, concordances, and collocations.

Overall, it is reasonable to start these analytical tasks with “open coding”: that is, using both

emergent and preconceived categories. However, it is better to proceed to “axial coding,”

establishing the normative concepts’ dynamic location within this 3D-matrix along

continuums rather than in a strict, binary, categorization (Blaikie 2010: 211).

Beyond description, we can use analyze and interpret data to account for what it is that

drives changes in PPT and whether and how these changes drove difference in political

behavior. When exploring the drivers of PPT, researchers should pay attention to spatio-

temporal congruence using comparative-historical methodology. They should also be mindful

in their explanatory exploration of both etic rationale (scholarly plausible causality) and emic

rationale (how the social actors themselves reason their own normative transformation). The

legitimating arguments’ causal force can be assessed by examining temporal ordering,

congruence between beliefs and behavior, the justification or sanction of “correct behavior”

and deviation, and the reframing of interests according to the new norms, even when they

seem to run counter to the actors’ antecedent interests (Crawford 2002).

To illustrate the research plan, my final example returns to the first: the PPT, and

NOCA, of the Arab Spring. The descriptive task is to analyze the sort, scale, and scope of the

21

societal social contracts: that is, the ethical-political principles guiding Arab publics in

legitimating, and delegitimating, authority. The abductive strategy leads us to probe the

natural language of legitimation: the ways Arab societies morally reason politics. Relevant

sources from before and throughout the uprisings include media (both official and non-

official), social media (especially popular Facebook pages, where deliberations transpire),

blogs, chronicles of activists, public speeches (both governmental and by dissidents), prose

and poetry, and, last but not least, widespread political slogans. Initial samples suggest a host

of normative concepts, such as tyranny, freedom, justice, dignity, or Sharia. The study then

proceeds in grounded fashion, going back and forth between data selection/collection and data

analysis/interpretation, using both main methods, to explore, retroductively, causal

mechanisms.

To sort the normative concepts, we can either resort to existent typologies or produce

a new typology. This latter distinguishes between negative and positive political

legitimations: Negative political legitimation (NPL) answers “what is legitimate?”—morally

reasoning where to draw the line between conflicting considerations (e.g. authority and

liberty); Positive political legitimation (PPL) answers “who is the legitimator?”—morally

reasoning politics by positing who has the right to draw that line in the first place. Such

typology can be complemented by distinguishing between weak and strong agency, pertaining

to the degree to which the social actors morally reason their politics.

In coding the concepts, we draw mainly on discourse-tracing the representative sample

using both preconceived and emergent categories, and proceed to axial coding along

continuum(s) of legitimation types. We would find, for instance, that certain Arabic concepts

suggest far greater human agency than others (e.g., “responsibility” and “predestination”) and

that some concepts pertain to what is or is not legitimate (e.g., “justice” and “tyranny”) while

others prescribe who is the legitimator (e.g., “God’s will” and “popular will”).

22

In establishing scale, we turn to both discourse-tracing and corpus linguistics in order

to reveal the justificatory beliefs to which these concepts allude and consider how

foundational they are; for instance, whether the delegitimating concept of “tyranny” draws

more on notions of “freedom,” “justice,” or divine Law (“Sharia”). Finally, we can infer the

scope (salience and resonance) of the various concepts mainly through diachronic corpus

linguistics; but its findings, by indicating authorship and genre, enable more qualitative work

on the agents of (de)legitimation. We can, for instance, discourse-trace the Arab Spring’s

immensely popular slogan (“the people want to bring does the regime”)—emerging from

Tunisian poetry and accompanied by popular Arab rhythm.

Finally, this study may proceed to explore explanations for the changing Arab PPT,

based on spatio-temporal congruence (e.g., between the rise and fall of certain key concepts

through the introduction and spread of social media), on comparative-historical methodology

(e.g., the difference between presidential and monarchical regimes), and on the accounts of

Arab actors themselves (mainly dissidents).

Conclusion

Some thirty years ago, Spates (1983: 28) considered the turbulent scholarly trajectory

of the analysis of values—“those moral beliefs to which people appealed for the ultimate

rationales of action”—scholarship that rose and declined with the work of Talcott Parsons

(1935). Spates (1983: 27) convincingly concluded that “values analysis” can be adequately

renewed only “if (a) it develops grounded theory and research methods—i.e. hypotheses and

techniques tied, from the outset, to the values of real populations; (b) it undertakes

simultaneous multi-technique observations of the same population.”

In this article, I followed Spates’ prescription in aiding this ongoing task of scholarly

renewal, focusing on the macro sociolinguistic task of explicating the language of legitimation

that inform the changing public adherence to the prescriptive principles (PPT). I proposed that

23

normative concepts provide a viable portal for analyzing PPT. I suggested that abductive

exploration provides the best strategy for pursuing such study, which would benefit from the

complementary methodological merits of mixing corpus linguistics and discourse-tracing in

order to analyze the sort, scale, and scope of normative concepts.

Legitimacy is an absolute horizon. Like the horizon, legitimacy seems elusive.

Political actors often believe legitimacy slips away as quickly as they approach it; and

scholars are likewise frustrated by its intangibility. But legitimacy is an absolute horizon:

first, because it is approachable—political actors may in fact have more or less of it; and

second, because while we cannot see legitimacy, we can indirectly detect it by tracing societal

principled legitimation via language and pertinent normative concepts. Indeed, this is how

astrophysicists detect the boundaries of a black hole—the literal “absolute horizon”—by

studying the effects of gravity on light. Learning legitimation and its language, inter alia

through normative concepts, is vital to deciphering the changing sociopolitical realities of our

time.

24

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