Qualitative Coding Data for 'Austerity and the Politics of Insecurity: Immigration, Economic Vulnerability, and Political Realignment in Coastal Kent – An Arendtian Lens'

This repository contains the supplementary qualitative coding datasets for the thesis: Austerity and the Politics of Insecurity: Immigration, Economic Vulnerability, and Political Realignment in Coastal Kent – An Arendtian Lens. The data maps the political articulation of structural decline and border insecurity by Members of Parliament (MPs) representing coastal Kent constituencies. The corpus consists of parliamentary transcripts extracted from Hansard, covering both Commons Chamber and Westminster Hall debates between 7 June 2001 and 31 December 2025. Speeches were filtered using a bounded set of keywords (immigration, asylum, border, refugee, crossings, Channel, boat) to capture the evolution of political rhetoric across the pre-austerity and post-austerity periods. The repository includes two complementary datasets that support the thematic analysis and theoretical conclusions of the thesis: Dataset A: Longitudinal Thematic Coding Matrix for Parliamentary Debates (2001–2025)This dataset tracks the temporal evolution of immigration rhetoric over two decades. It provides a year-by-year breakdown of specific discursive codes grouped into five overarching themes (e.g., structural pressure, loss of border control, humanitarian concern). This matrix demonstrates how political framing shifted over time, notably tracking the post-2010 expansion of 'crisis' articulation, the criminalisation of small boat crossings, and narratives of systemic state failure in the austerity era. Dataset B: Distribution of Parliamentary Contributions by Constituency, MP, and Party (2001–2025) This dataset details the geographical and partisan distribution of the coded parliamentary speeches. It provides a chronological record of which MPs engaged with the target debates, tracking contributions across parliamentary terms. This data establishes the hyper-localised nature of the discourse, confirming the cross-party persistence of immigration rhetoric and highlighting constituencies such as Dover and Deal as the primary epicentres for the political translation of structural insecurity.