Linguistic Combat In The Hungarian Parliament: Exploring Political Discourse And Perception Of Incivility In A Gender-Imbalanced Arena [before doctoral defense]

Kivonat, rövid leírás

The thesis aims to contribute to the growing literature on political incivility by offering a gendered and context-sensitive analysis rooted in Hungarian parliamentary discourse. The findings may have broader theoretical implications for understanding how democratic norms are negotiated and perceived within gender-imbalanced political environments and how gendered expectations influence political communication. However, the empirical findings are interpreted primarily within the Hungarian political and cultural context. The contribution of the dissertation can be summarised along three dimensions: theoretical, methodological, and empirical. The theoretical contribution lies in clarifying the relationship between political incivility and impoliteness and in integrating discourse production, audience perception, and gendered expectations within a single analytical framework. The dissertation examines whether political incivility is interpreted differently across speakers and audiences within the Hungarian context. The empirical contribution lies in providing a systematic analysis of political incivility within a highly gender-imbalanced, post-socialist Central European parliamentary setting. The study broadens the geographical scope of political incivility research, which has predominantly focused on the United States and Western Europe. The Hungarian case therefore offers an opportunity to examine political incivility within a political, institutional, and cultural environment that differs from many of the contexts most frequently represented in the existing literature. The methodological contribution lies in combining qualitative and quantitative discourse analysis with AI-assisted annotation of uncivil language in Hungarian parliamentary debates and subsequently linking these findings to a quantitative survey experiment. The survey experiment examines how citizens perceive selected examples of parliamentary language and presents political speech excerpts that vary in tone and attributed speaker gender, allowing controlled comparison of audience evaluations. The combination of these approaches connects the production of political incivility with its perception: the discourse analysis identifies how incivility is manifested in parliamentary communication, while the survey experiment examines how such communication is interpreted and evaluated by citizens.