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A number of political scientists think of political discourse studies as a purely theoretical approach without any empirical utility. This, in fact, is misleading. Political discourse studies reach for theoretical findings and are based on an innovative approach in terms of perspective and theory. Nevertheless, political discourse studies are also empirical and observe the empirical world from a theoretically specified point of view bringing forth empirical findings, such as case studies.

Hungarian research in political discourse studies now has a history of more than ten years, with both theoretical and empirical projects. It began by exploring the linguistic nature of political reality, followed by theorising a discursive interpretation of politics. Presently the emphasis is on empirical analyses. The research has been financed mostly by OTKA [Hungarian Scientific Research Fund] and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

In the process, we discovered that the discursive interpretation of political reality bears legitimacy in itself and that the exploration should not be limited to a single field of politics, for example power/authority or injustice. Moreover, we need to extend our knowledge concerning postmodern philosophy and the poststructural turn in social sciences. Therefore, political discourse studies must rather be a re-reading of politics that focuses on the meaningful reality of politics.

The final reports (or only the plans) of each research project are available in Hungarian with short English summaries in the attached files.