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IPRES Coding Assignment
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Essay written for IPRES Assignment 1 on coding speeches about political trust.
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AgnesTutorial 2
Cybele Atme
Assignment 1
Due on 10/02/20
Word count: 1908
Approaches to Issues in Political Trust
At the heart of politics lies trust. Trust is needed, for example, for Rousseau’s social
contract to work in action, but, perhaps more importantly, trust is necessary for society to
function at its very core. Deborah Stone describes trust as depending “on people’s confidence
that others will obey rules and honour their commitments, and that a strong authority will
enforce rules and contracts” (Stone 2012: 77). In the modern world this trust, specifically
between citizens and their governments, seems to be diminishing. Due to its importance to
how the world functions, this is an issue that many politicians have tried and are trying to
tackle. Two noteworthy speeches on this topic were given by David Cameron and Stefan
Löfven in 2009 and 2016 respectively. Cameron’s speech is referred to as “fixing broken
politics” and details exactly that – how he believes Britain’s broken politics should be repaired.
Löfven, the Swedish Prime Minister since 2014 (Prime Minister 2019), gave his speech in
September 2016 to the Riksdag as a “Statement of Government Policy”, which dealt with how
Sweden should be going about the issue of a decrease in political trust. These two speeches
have many things in common, such as believing that cooperation and reform are the only
ways restore trust between citizens and the government. However, the two ultimately differ
in how they position themselves in regard to the rest of the world. The objective of this essay
is to investigate how, despite touching on very similar topics, Cameron and Löfven arrive at
such different conclusions.
In terms of investigating this topic, the two speeches were inductively coded. A ‘code’,
as defined by Johnny Saldaña, is “often a word or short phrase that symbolically assigns a
summative, salient, essence-capturing, and/or evocative attribute for a portion of language-
based or visual data” (Saldaña 2009: 3). When ‘coding’, a text should be read at least twice,
with the researcher taking note of emerging and reoccurring ideas that are then later
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, captured in a single word or short phrase that describes what is meant in the text. This can
then be used to identify patterns or mark relationships between subject matters within the
texts being looked into. This method is applied to the investigation of Cameron and Löfven’s
speeches. When initially analysing the speeches, several things will be noticed. Mainly, the
two speeches touched on a lot of topics that could provide interesting comparisons, but
ultimately did not establish a strong enough link to either political trust, the other speech, or
both, for further analysis. This filtered down an initial thirty-one codes to sixteen, as can be
seen in Appendix A. It should also be noted that the order in which the two speeches were
coded likely had an influence on which final codes were chosen, as comparative research
usually requires a basis of (at least) some similarities which is what was automatically initially
looked for in the second speech.
Deciding on the codes to be used allowed for a comparison between the use of these
codes in the speeches to be made. As can be seen in Appendix C, the codes were divided into
the ones used only by Cameron, the ones used only by Löfven, and those used by them both.
Seeing how many codes the two had in common made their very different conclusions even
more perplexing. However, after having put the codes into three categories, namely social
structures, social awareness, and development, the use of these categories could also be
compared in the speeches. This provided further insight into their lines of thought as these
categories highlight where Cameron’s and Löfven’s main focuses are in relation to declining
political trust. Cameron’s speech made use of a total of five codes from the social structures
category, three from the social awareness category, and one from the development category.
Löfven’s speech used six social structure codes, four social awareness codes, and three
development codes. To put this in numbers, Cameron’s speech has a ratio of 5:3:1, while
Löfven’s ratio is 3:2:1.5. Though neither are completely proportionate, Löfven appears to
weigh the different categories more evenly than Cameron, which could explain how they end
up with different solutions to the issue at hand.
This leads to the two main themes that can be derived from the codes and categories
used to analyse the data: internationalisation and individualisation. In the context of this
essay, internationalisation refers to the process of improving and increasing relations
between nations, while individualisation is a process that does the opposite: focusing on
relations within the nation itself. These two themes can serve a multitude of purposes for this
investigation. They describe the solution adopted by the two politicians, as Cameron seems
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