Browsing by Subject "Wordfish"

The economy of Finland has encountered a drastic transformation in past 15 years. There has been a shift from industrial economy towards service economy, which had a major effect on the traditional industries. Furthermore, the external shock like the European finance crisis had a great impact on Finnish economy. In this thesis I will examine the implications of these changes for the policy positions of Finnish neo-corporate actors. These actors have traditionally had a major influence on the Finnish economic and social policies. I will use the theory of Competition State by Cerny as a midrange theory in this study. According to this theory, state actors are threatened by globalization and market pressures. They respond to these threats by promoting competitiveness. I will examine the changes using Wordfish, a computer assisted text analysis method, which can be utilized to analyse policy positions. This method has not been applied on texts written in Finnish before. I will test the validity of this method using Finnish party manifestos from elections of the year 2007. I will then use this method to examine the policy positions of Finnish industrial relations industry groups during the time period from 2003 to 2015. The results are then analysed using the theory of competition state theory. The thesis is structured in following way. I will first present the outlines of Finnish industrial relations and collective bargaining. Then I will shortly discuss the economic changes in Finland. After that I will examine institutionalism and the theory of the competition state. After this I will present my methodological approach. I will also present the results of the Wordfish validation using texts in Finnish. After that I will present the results of industrial relations interest group policy analysis. Finally I will discuss the results using the theory of the competition state. There are three main findings in this thesis. First of all, Wordfish as method can be used to analyze also texts which are written in Finnish. The results of the Wordfish analysis are similar to expert policy analysis results from same manifestos. The second main finding is that there has been a shift in language, where certain concepts became used more frequently. These concepts can be partly explained by the competition state theory. The third main result is that the Finnish trade union confederations can be divided into two groups in adaptation of these concepts.