Tracing legitimacy through discursive repertoires: A mixed-method analysis of authoritarian crisis communication

This article analyzes how legitimacy is discursively constructed in authoritarian crisis communication through a longitudinal study of China’s State Council Joint Prevention and Control Mechanism (JPCM) press conferences (2020–2023). Drawing on a corpus of 203 conferences, the study employs Dynamic Topic Modeling (DTM) to map thematic evolution and guide systematic text selection, before applying Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to trace how legitimation strategies unfold across crisis phases. Findings reveal four adaptive phases: mobilizing solidarity, consolidating compliance, reasserting authority, and normalizing governance. These shifts illustrate that legitimation is not fixed but performed through evolving discursive repertoires that combine authorization, rationalization, moral evaluation, and mythopoesis in response to changing crisis conditions. By conceptualizing legitimation as a sequential process, the study advances discourse theory and contributes to debates on authoritarian resilience. More broadly, it demonstrates the value of combining computational and discourse-analytical approaches to examine how communication functions as a foundation of political legitimacy.