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https://doi.org/10.22586/csp.v58i1.38468
Newspaper Discourse during the 1990 Election Campaign in Croatia: A LIWC Analysis of Newspaper Coverage of the Croatian Democratic Union and the League of Communists of Croatia – Party of Democratic Changes Campaign Rallies in Split
Tea Luburić
; Split, Hrvatska
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Mladenko Domazet
; Odsjek za povijest, Filozofski fakultet Sveučilišta u Splitu, Split, Hrvatska
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* Dopisni autor.
Sažetak
This article analyses newspaper coverage of election rallies organised by the Croatian Democratic Union (Hrvatska demokratska zajednica, HDZ) and the League of Communists of Croatia – Party of Democratic Changes (Savez komunista Hrvatske – Stranka demokratskih promjena, SKH–SDP), held in Split on 14 and 15 April 1990, immediately before the first multiparty elections in the Socialist Republic of Croatia. The corpus comprises all available newspaper reports published on 15 and 16 April 1990, encompassing thirteen articles from seven daily newspapers.
The study employs the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC-22) software to conduct a computer-assisted analysis of linguistic features. Five dimensions relevant to media discourse are examined: Word count, Analytic, Clout, Authentic, and Tone. Descriptive findings are complemented by inferential statistical analysis using the Mann–Whitney U test, an appropriate non-parametric method for small samples.
The descriptive analysis identified modest variation between reports on the two political parties. Coverage of the League of Communists of Croatia – Party of Democratic Changes displayed slightly higher levels of analytical language, authoritativeness, and positive emotional tone. However, the Mann–Whitney U test found no statistically significant differences between the two sets of reports across any of the five LIWC dimensions. These findings suggest that newspaper coverage in the final stage of the 1990 election campaign was largely characterised by a professional, institutionally oriented style of reporting rather than by pronounced linguistic bias in favour of either political actor.
By combining computational text analysis with statistical testing and data visualisation, this study offers a systematic perspective on the linguistic characteristics of newspaper reporting during Croatia's democratic transition. It contributes to the study of early political journalism in Croatia, demonstrates the applicability of LIWC to historical newspaper corpora, and provides a methodological framework for future research based on larger datasets and broader samples of election campaign coverage.
Ključne riječi
LIWC; newspaper discourse; 1990 Croatian elections; Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ); League of Communists of Croatia – Party of Democratic Changes (SKH–SDP); daily newspapers
Hrčak ID:
350880
URI
Datum izdavanja:
10.9.2026.
Posjeta: 0 *