Nationalism in the contemporary political landscape in Serbia (2017-2021)

• Autor(a) principal: Tot, Antonije
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/24989
• topic: Serbian nationalism; Análise do discurso -- Speech analysis; Online news media; Competitive authoritarianism; Nacionalismo sérvio; Meios de comunicação on-line; Autoritarismo competitivo

The subject of this thesis is a discourse analysis of select opinion pieces by the regular contributors writing for four Serbian online media outlets (Večernje novosti, Politika, Danas, and Nova) in the period between 2017 and 2021, for the purpose of identifying the nature, prevalence, and positioning of Serbian nationalist ideology between the two major political blocs in the contemporary political landscape in Serbia. The aforementioned outlets were chosen to represent the two sides of the political divide (pro-government and pro-opposition) and two different styles of political communication (neutral and tabloid), while the chosen time period reflects the decline of Serbia from a full democracy to a hybrid regime, as assessed in the Freedom House Report (2020), limiting the scope of the analysis to a political system which conforms to the theoretical model of competitive authoritarianism, with all of its implications on the media sphere. After scanning the four outlets for texts featuring themes relevant to Serbian nationalism, a hundred and twenty five (125) were included in the analysis and categorized according to the prevalent discourse(s) featured within, as defined in the methodological section. These were then related to the theoretical models of banal and virulent nationalism, the distinction between nationalism and populism (demagoguery), as well as to the “First” and “Other” Serbia discursive frame. The results of the analysis show that Serbian nationalist discourse is featured much more prominently in the writings of pro-government media actors, but that banal nationalism is ubiquitous across the political divide.