Enacting the Ombud’s Roles: A Study Based on Text Mining

Abstract

Abstract What roles do ombuds institutions create through their activities? How does the creation of ombuds’ roles relate to the person of office-holders? Based on a case study of the Austrian Ombudsman Board, the present article analyses the discursive production of ombuds’ roles via a corpus of annual reports. Using the text-mining programme Alceste, the paper examines how topics are prioritised in activity descriptions, how the institutional mission is presented and put into practice, and how the complainants are described. Alceste identified a total of nine “lexical worlds” that point both to the diversity of the roles that are exercised by the ombudspersons and to the existence of three ideal types of approaches to the ombuds office. Results also highlight the fact that these different, partially interrelated roles are characteristic of certain individual organisational units and people, which indicates a personalisation of the office. At the same time, some of these roles are shared by several ombudspersons.