NormRechts

The Normalization of Right-wing Populist and New Right Discourses in Japan and Germany

(Third Party Funds Group – Overall project)

Project leader: Stephanie Evert, Fabian Schäfer
Project members: Tamara Svenja Fuchs, Philipp Heinrich
Start date: 2022-04-01
End date: 2025-03-31
Extension Date: 2025-09-30
Acronym: NormRechts
Funding source: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)

Abstract:

In this comparative research project we study different instances of political populism as a "thin ideology" (Mudde/Kaltwasser) in its respective ideological proximity to right-wing discourses in Japan and Germany from a discourse-analytical perspective. In particular, applying the methods of corpus and computational linguistics and corpus-based critical discourse analysis, we analyze the long-term effects of (new-)right-wing discursive strategies and right-wing populist politics on everyday language and political discourse. Our research design takes into account various media and types of text corpora, including social media (Twitter), two daily newspapers per country, and the parliamentary minutes of both countries, to study the normalization of new-right and right-wing populist discursive fragments (i.e. racism/nativism, anti-feminism and historical revisionism) in different public spheres and over the period of one decade (2012-2022).

Publications:

• Heinrich P., Blombach A., Doan Dang BM., Zilio L., Havenstein L., Dykes N., Evert S., Schäfer F.:
  Automatic Identification of COVID-19-Related Conspiracy Narratives in German Telegram Channels and Chats
  The 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024) (Turin, 2024-05-20 - 2024-05-25)
  In: Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue (ed.): Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024) 2024
  Open Access: https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.173
  URL: https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.173
• Schäfer F., Kalashnikova O.:
  Russian State-controlled Propaganda and its Proxies: Pro-Russian Political Actors in Japan
  In: Asia-Pacific Journal : Japan Focus 22 (2024)
  ISSN: 1557-4660
  Open Access: https://apjjf.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Article_5836.pdf
  URL: https://apjjf.org/2024/3/schafer-kalashnikova
• Schäfer F.:
  The Online Ecosystem of the Japanese Far Right: Platforms, Actors, Organizations (Series Editor)
  2024
  (Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus)
  URL: https://apjjf.org/online-ecosystem
• Havenstein L., Schäfer F.:
  Parroting the U.S. Far-Right: Former Fringe Party Politician and Conspiracy Entrepreneur Yukihisa Oikawa
  In: Asia-Pacific Journal : Japan Focus 22 (2024), Article No.: 4
  ISSN: 1557-4660
  Open Access: https://apjjf.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Article_5850.pdf
  URL: https://apjjf.org/2024/6/havenstein-schafer
• Heinrich P., Blombach A., Dykes N., Evert S., Fuchs TS., Havenstein L., Schäfer F.:
  From Linguistic to Discursive Patterns: Introducing Discoursemes as a Basic Unit of Discourse Analysis
  In: CADAAD Journal. Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines 16 (2024), p. 87-111
  ISSN: 1752-3079
  DOI: 10.21827/cadaad.16.2.42457