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Allen E.P. [Integrative methodology for political discourse research: from conceptualization to empirical basis] Political Science and Technology, 2026, Vol. 6, Iss. 2 Available at: https://politicjournal.ru/PDF/02PK226.pdf (in Russian).

Integrative methodology for political discourse research: from conceptualization to empirical basis

Allen Elena Pavlovna
Russian State University of Tourism and Service, Moscow, Russia
State University of Education, Moscow, Russia
E-mail: var064@yandex.ru

Abstract. The relevance of the study is driven by the transformation of political communication under the conditions of digitalization and hybridization of international relations, which calls for new methodological approaches capable of integrating the depth of qualitative analysis with the breadth of quantitative methods. The traditional opposition between close reading and distant reading is giving way to their synthesis, which remains insufficiently developed for large text corpora. The object of the study is Russian-American political discourse from 2014 to 2026. The subject is communicative technologies and actor positioning strategies as realized in official, media, and digital texts. The methodological framework is based on a synthesis of Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis, Entman’s framing theory, and computational methods (LDA topic modeling, BERT/RoBERTa transformers) integrated into a three-stage integrative model that ensures an iterative dialogue between qualitative conceptualization and quantitative scaling. The empirical basis includes three types of sources: official documents, media publications, and digital platform materials (VK, Telegram, etc.). The proposed model is applied systematically for the first time to a comparable corpus of Russian and English language texts using a unified annotation scheme, thus bridging the gap between Western and Russian research traditions in computational political discourse analysis. The developed toolkit enables dynamic monitoring of changes in actor rhetoric in near real time. The significance of the results lies in creating a verifiable toolkit for empirical analysis of large text corpora, allowing not only to register semantic shifts and discursive patterns but also to reconstruct strategies of constructing political reality. This is crucial for studying communication technologies under conditions of limited direct observation of strategic interaction, as well as for developing reproducible methods in computational social sciences.

Keywords: political discourse; computational linguistics; integrative methodology; topic modeling; LDA; transformers; BERT; RoBERTa; semantic shift; framing; critical discourse analysis; Russian-American relations; large text corpora; digital political communication

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