Browsing by Subject "kuntavaalit"

The aim of this study was to examine how political parties brought out questions about social equality in their platforms for communal elections of Helsinki in 2017. It has been stated that inequality and income disparity have been on the rise in the Nordic countries since the end of 1980’s. Social policy has not been able to prevent the polarization of the society. Since language both describes the world but also changes it, it is important to examine the discourses in the platforms to understand the changes in social equality. This study is a discourse analysis done by using Carol Bacchi’s What’s the Problem represented to be? (WPR) analysis. With WPR analysis this study concentrates on those discursive patterns in which problems of social equality have been represented. The material includes platforms of all ten political parties which in the elections got at least one council member through to the municipal council. The material was collected from the parties’ web pages in October 2017. In the material studied there was found social equality problem representations that were typical for parties’ values. Problems of social equality were often described from the viewpoint of equal opportunity, economy and neo-liberalism, exclusiveness, and egalitarianism. Features of equal opportunity discourse were found almost throughout the material studied, which was in line with the conception of its hegemonic status. In many platforms problems of social equality were kept silent for example when speaking about early childhood education as a question of the parents’ choice of freedom instead of as a way to increase equality between children. On the grounds of the analysis, the representations of social equality problems varied between parties, but the equal opportunity discourse was a common feature. In addition, the societal discussion about rising inequality and immigration was seen as a strong background discourse, which affected the way problems were represented.