The Emotional Formulation of Neoliberal Discource: a Computational Approach

Claims about neoliberalism frequently involve assumptions about its affective life (Penz & Sauer, 2020) and the societies that form under its influence. Previous work has shown that affects are part of the conditions of the formation of particular “neoliberalisms” (Andersen 2015) however, so far these approaches lack the empirical evidence to map the affective circulation of neoliberalism as a hegemonic discourse. This paper attempts a computational analysis of a large textual data set within the highly debated field of neoliberal discourse and public policy in an effort to investigate the relationship between the affective life of the ideology and the processes that generate ‘neoliberal subjectivities’. We built a corpus of more than 30K articles and blog entries spanning from 1978 until 2020 derived from well-acknowledged neoliberal think tanks. This double corpus allowed for a theory-driven detection of ideological and linguistic markers as well as a data-driven approach of feature extraction and domain-specific concepts. We focused on both the article and concept level, using lexicons to obtain emotional and affective scores for all the individual articles and the important concepts within the corpus such as economy, regulation, corporations, health, education, and environment. The results show not only that the degree of emotionality and affectivity are amongst the most important predictors strongly related to the way neoliberal discourse handles specific issues, but also how specific affective terms are being connected to them throughout the years indicating how ideologically charged texts tend to “negotiate” core concepts and therefore ideas of public life.  References Penz, O. & Sauer, B., 2020, Governing Affects: Neoliberalism, Neo-Bureaucracies, and Service Work, Routledge Anderson, B. (2015) «Neoliberal affects». Progress in human geography, 40 (6): 734-753, http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0309132515613167