The Disrupting Effect of Focusing Events on Immigration Discourse in the U.S. and U.K.: An Automated Discourse Network Analysis

In this article, we develop events-based discourse network analysis (EDNA),an automated approach combining event analysis, topic modeling, and network analysis to identify changes in political discourse over time. This article makes two main contributions. Methodologically, EDNA automates the labor-intensive manual coding required by traditional discourse network analysis while centering analysis around events, enabling efficient comparison of discourse networks across time. Theoretically, this scalability allows us to systematically demonstrate—across 14 cases—that focusing events consistently restructure legislative discourse networks, a pattern previously difficult to establish empirically. Applying EDNA to U.K. parliamentary and U.S. congressional immigration speeches (1975 to 2020), we find that focusing events disrupt discourse communities in two forms: communities either become more cohesive or more dispersed. We illustrate these contrasting patterns through two exemplary cases: the 1993 Golden Venture Ship Grounding and the 2000 Dover lorry deaths. After Golden Venture, legislator discourse communities became more cohesive and interconnected; after Dover, communities became less dense and more dispersed. The mechanisms underlying these divergent outcomes warrant future theoretical investigation. Beyond policy discourse, EDNA provides a scalable and replicable framework for studying social movements, media narratives, and cultural evolution—offering an efficient method for examining relational patterns within large corpora.