Context-Sensitive Mapping of Rule of Law Narratives. Sources and Methods

This chapter describes the methodological approach of the study “Narrating the Rule of Law”, specifically how we combine deductive and inductive research strategies to map rule of law narratives in a way that is sensitive to the context while aiming to keep findings comparable. As described in this chapter, we analysed debates with direct mentions of the term ‘rule of law’ or its semantic equivalents. We additionally covered debates on key legislation related to the rule of law in order to take into account that the rule of law may be associated with different things in different contexts and that parliamentarians may also talk about the rule of law and related issues without explicitly using the term. After presenting the sources, we explain how we reconstructed the rule of law narratives employing qualitative content analysis. Finally, we reflect on the limitations of our methodological approach and discuss what conclusions can be drawn from our empirical findings.