Discursive strategies of legitimization: The case of abortion in Ireland in 2018

The following article is based on a study on abortion discourse carried out in Ireland in 2018 prior to and after the referendum to Repeal the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, allowing for legislation to be introduced regulating termination of pregnancy. The main focus of the study is to identify the strategies of legitimization employed by both online users and campaign bodies in the period directly before and after the historic referendum. The article also aims to examine how the discursive strategies engage in creating national identities as well as identities of the collective voter groups. The corpus includes unregulated textual and regulated visual data collected between May and June 2018. The textual data derive from the Facebook pages of four prominent campaigning bodies encompassing both sides of the referendum one month before and after the referendum, while the visual data include photos taken of the campaign posters displayed in Ireland. Critical Discourse Analysis forms the conceptual framework of the study. Analysis was undertaken by employing Reyes’ (2011) model of strategies of legitimization in political discourse as well as the two visual analysis frameworks proposed by van Leeuwen (2008) and Ledin and Machin (2018). A mixed-method approach in the format of a triangulation design (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2007) is used, whereby qualitative textual and visual discourses are transformed into quantitative data for the purpose of analysis. The findings indicate that the strategy of emotion is the most utilized one; this becomes apparent through the quantitatively high use of terms such as ‘rape’, ‘incest’ or ‘murder’, operationalised to provoke an emotional reaction in the reader. The results also point to high instances of ‘othering’ strategies employed by the different groups participating in the discourse.