Corpus of Scottish political party discourse (2013-2022)

This corpus of Scottish discourses was complied for the purposes of my PhD dissertation: "The constitutional discourse of Scottish political parties after Brexit: assessing the effects of a change in governance on the definition of the polity". It covers a substantial and pivotal period of Scotland’s political history (from David Cameron's Bloomberg speech promising a referendum on EU membership in January 2013, to the UK Supreme Court's ruling that the Scottish Parliament does not have the power to legislate for a second referendum on independence in November 2022) and includes the discourses of the main political parties sitting in the Scottish Parliament today (the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party, the Scottish Labour Party, the Scottish National Party, the Scottish Liberal Democrats and the Scottish Green Party). It comprises 1,355 texts and nearly 2.3 million words of political discourse, covering a wide variety of topics and platforms (party websites, party manifestos for UK and Scottish elections, policy papers, government publications and party leaders' speeches). The whole dataset is organised in 15 sub-corpora: 3 corpora covering 3 distinct periods of time (2013-2016, 2016-2020, 2020-2022) for each of the five political parties. The discursive analysis conducted in my PhD served a specific purpose and focused on a specific research puzzle. As such, I have by no means exhausted all the potential uses of the corpus. The heterogeneity and volume of the data set means that it could be useful to explore a wide range of issues and puzzles, not only related to Scottish politics, but also to discursive and linguistic inquiries. That is why the corpus is available to all who ask for it. It is highly recommended that anyone wishing to use the corpus read the attached file first. It is an excerpt from the 6th chapter of my PhD dissertation (From methodologies to methods: a corpus-assisted discourse-historical analysis of the constitutional discourse in Scotland) in which I go over useful information regarding the corpus compilation process, from the identification of the data (timeframe, agents and genres) to the selection and collection of texts (where and how the data was located and collected). The corpus itself is available as annex files.