Exploring stance in the manifestos of 3 candidates for the Hong Kong Chief Executive election 2017: Combining CDA and corpus-like insights

Abstract

While much work has been done on the textual analysis of political discourses in Western countries, relatively little has focused on electoral manifestos in the East. Manifestos are open extensive declarations of individual ideologies for campaigns, comprising small texts in terms of word count but with massive implications for voters’ perception of the candidates’ political leanings. Focusing on the manifestos produced by the three candidates for the Hong Kong Chief Executive Election 2017, this article compares the linguistic features of the written political evaluative stances of the candidates. Combining critical discourse analysis using the APPRAISAL model, with analyses traditionally associated with corpus linguistics including log-likelihood keyword analysis and statistically driven visualisations, we find clear differences between the candidates in terms of the allocation of evaluative resources in their manifestos, representative of the perceived evaluative stance of candidate. Our findings justify the use of corpus linguistic techniques as a complement to critical discourse analysis, even in data with small word counts (<5000), in situations where nuanced, micro-managed selection of language resources is crucial to the perception of stance in very high-stakes contexts.