De strijd om discursieve macht een relationele discoursanalyse van het Nederlandse integratiedebat, 1990-2005

This paper develops an approach for relational discourse analysis to scrutinize contentious public debates. We apply the approach in a case study on the Dutch debate on minority integration. The data consist of 5,397 negative, neutral and positive references that 1,111 actors on the opinion pages of Dutch newspapers made to each other in the period 1990-2005. We show how clusters formed around central persons and how power relations within and between clusters emerged and were transformed over time. Over different periods in the debate, we find a recurrent pattern: a small yet cohesive group of challengers with strong leaders dominated the debate and forced their framing of integration issues upon other participants.