The aim of this article is to present the findings of an analytical framework we have designed to monitor discriminatory political discourse on immigration. Through the understanding of how some of the most relevant studies in three disciplines (political science, social psychology and linguistics) have framed racism, we try to infer how such racism may manifest in discourse through particular discriminatory tendencies. The combination of these tendencies has contributed to the designing of the proposed analytical framework that aims, by means of 12 standards, to systematically certify political discourse as discriminatory, quantify how much discriminatory discourse is and assess how such discrimination is legitimised or justified. By implementing such a framework within the context of Catalonia, this pilot study offers a global picture of how Catalan political discourse on immigration is constructed and how each of the standards appears (or does not appear) in discourse. Once the viability of this framework is proven, we conclude it could be the basis of comparative research in other contexts.

Overt constructions of discrimination in political discourse towards immigrants are easy to detect and have been traditionally associated with far-right parties. However, mainstream political discourse on immigration delivered by so-called center or center-left parties has transformed into more subtle forms of discursive discrimination, which might not be obvious and need a closer analysis in order to be spotted in discourse. Overt discriminatory discourse has been studied by disciplines, such as political sociology, social psychology and Critical Discourse Studies, but subtle discriminatory constructions have been rather neglected. By combining these three disciplines, we propose here a multidisciplinary and multitheorical framework to systematically analyze subtle discriminatory political discourse on immigration. It aims at contributing to the development of a methodology for a socio-political analysis that allows to detect subtle discriminatory political discourse on immigration. Such framework is composed by four strategies with different degrees of subtleness: highlighting, diminishing, homogenizing and normalizing.

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This article explores the social representation of immigration that emanates from Partido Popular's political discourse. Partido Popular (PP) is a political party which was at the head of the state in Spain from 1996 to 2004. From Critical Discourse Analysis perspective, we will carry out a semantic analysis of the main themes and macropropositions that compose the macrostructure of the selected corpus. This corpus is formed by twenty-four parliamentary debates and thirty-two interviews done to different members of Partido Popular about immigration. From this analysis, we will show how underlying ideologies operate, how they appear discursively and they determine the speaker's linguistic production. In the same way, we will make explicit the forms by which Partido Popular's discourse constructs and reconstructs prejudices against migrants.

On 1 October 2017, Catalonia held an independence referendum. The Spanish state had previously declared this referendum illegal and activated political and security devices to prevent it from being held. The referendum was the tipping point of the so-called Catalan 'Process', which would continue with the suspension of Catalonia's self-government and the imprisonment of several Catalan politicians and activists. Heated political discussion has centred current Spanish (and sometimes even European) politics on issues related to the legitimacy of both the Process and the actors involved in it. This paper aims to understand how the different Catalan political parties framed the Process by looking at the parliamentary discourses which prevailed in the Catalan Parliament one month before and one month after the holding of the referendum. The data are analysed using a mixed-methods approach. We combine topic models (used to generate different frames associated with different political leanings inductively) with an in-depth examination of the contents of these frames. The results shed light on how the Catalan Process is framed according to different political leanings and contribute to our understanding of stateless and state-wide nationalism strategies.