CONTENT ANALYSIS AS A METHOD FOR DETERMINING THE POLITICAL PICTURE OF THE WORLD OF AN EXPERT-POLITICAL SCIENTIST (EVIDENCE FROM N.V. SUNGUROVSKY)

Abstract

For the first time the applying of the authors‘ method of content analysis to identify the political picture of the world is demonstrated. It's made on example of the texts by the Ukrainian political scientist and expert in the area of national security and defense N.V. Sungurovsky, published in 2017–2019. The study consists in the sequential conduction of political-semantic, political-linguistic and genre analysis of expert‘s publications. The intermediate results of each stage of the work allow 1) to draw the conclusions about how the expert models his political picture of the world; 2) to identify the most frequent and characteristic for him images; 3) to investigate how different political categories are related in his texts; 4) finally, to conclude how deeply the expert understands the problem he writes about. This allows to understand the specifics of his perception of some actors of the world politics (primarily the collective «West», Russia and Ukraine) and the relations between them and to get additional information about the expert, the degree of his involvement in the topic, also the manipulative techniques using by him. Applying of this method in political studies of expert discourse will contribute to the creation of discursive portraits (profiles) of political experts, as well as obtain deeper information about the expert community and political expertise.