The past decades witnessed enormous transformations in the built environment of cities, and one of these trends is the development of iconic megaprojects. Public protests against these projects occur frequently, and scholars in urban governance have diagnosed this as an emerging 'postpolitical' condition, that is, as a sign of a deficient democratic politics. Others criticise this kind of reasoning as a 'post-political-trap' (Beveridge and Koch, 2017), and demand more research. This article responds to this debate with an empirical study of the popular protests against the infrastructural public transport project Stuttgart 21 in Germany. We apply discourse network analysis to investigate the evolution of the discourse, illuminate multiple dynamic connections between issues and actors, and apply factor analysis to identify the key issues of the conflict. Our study complicates and qualifies the arguments for a 'post-political' state of urban politics.

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The increasing relevance of social networking platforms is accompanied by a growing number of studies using digital trace data. However, most studies still lack further understanding of the data-generating process. This analytical gap can be directly attributed to the prevalence of quantitative approaches, as only qualitative work is able to generate these insights. The broad methodological toolset of Discourse Network Analysis addresses this shortcoming as it combines both qualitative and quantitative approaches. The present study therefore employs Discourse Network Analysis in order to (1) determine different user groups’ varying role as senders and recipients of targeted online conversations, (2) identify and compare Twitter users’ (simultaneous) reference to different forms of conversational Twitter content, and to (3) asses the motivation of @message authors to direct particular tweets at particular user groups. To this end, this study analyzes @messages during the <em>BBC</em> program ‘Question Time’ on 2nd of June 2017—the final media encounter of Prime Minister Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn in the context of the 2017 UK election campaign. We draw on the theoretical background of Maarten Hajer’s discourse coalitions approach in order to investigate the preconditions for the formation of discourse coalitions in new and emerging virtual discourse arenas. Thus, our work not only mirrors the focus in existing literature on Twitter usage during high-profile political media events, but also emphasizes Twitter’s unique features for interactive exchange. This article identifies different forms of meta-talk and policy issues, which vary in both their general popularity with Twitter users as well as their interconnectedness. Furthermore, our analysis uncovers the motivation behind the decisions of @message authors to send particular @messages to certain groups of Twitter users. Finally, we could establish that media events only temporarily affect the topical foci of @message authors.

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