Discursive struggles over pesticide legitimacy in Switzerland: A news media analysis

Societal concerns about pesticides and their negative effects have increased significantly in recent years. These concerns cumulated into discursive struggles over pesticide legitimacy. Although the emerging transition towards low-pesticide agriculture has become an important area of research, our understanding of those pesticide discourses and their function in (de)stabilizing the pesticide regime is still limited. This study reveals the discursive elements by investigating topics, storylines and discourse coalitions and links them to policy and regime changes. The paper's argument is being built on the case of pesticide discourses in Switzerland. A corpus of 2,523 articles from the mainstream and farming press covering the period from 2011 to 2022 is analyzed by combining topic modeling and discourse analysis. The results show how two broad, distinct discourse coalitions competed by employing de- versus relegitimizing storylines. They also indicate that the external contestation rather led to a (preliminary) regime stabilization than to its destabilization.