The Discursive Politics of Growth Models: How Do Political Elites Conceptualize the Drivers of Economic Growth?

Joshua Cova

Recent scholarship on growth models has highlighted how national economic strategies depend to large extent upon the preferences of producer groups coalitions. Building on this theoretical framework, the project examines how political elites conceptualize the drivers of economic growth; asking which policies and sectors policymakers see as essential for sustaining prosperity. While prior research has investigated how voters align with parties’ economic platforms, little comparative research has been done on how elites themselves frame and articulate the drivers of economic growth. Using large-scale quantitative text analysis and advanced natural language processing methods, including machine learning classifiers and open-source large language models, the project systematically analyzes speeches, manifestos, parliamentary debates, press releases, and social media posts across several European economies such as Germany, the United Kingdom, and Italy from the past decades. By mapping how political elites discuss growth policies across time, countries, and party families, the project identifies variations in the policies that are seen as conducive to economic growth. Ultimately, it seeks to connect these “discursive” understandings of growth with empirical patterns in the composition of aggregate demand of different countries.