ABSTRACT
Claims-making analysis originates from the field of contentious politics and social movements research as a response to the then dominant focus on institutionalised politics. Its aim was to expand the focus and include the perspective of public contestation and civil society. This chapter discusses the definitions of a claim and the underlying assumptions regarding the process of public opinion formation processes and contestation in an increasingly mediatised world. It describes several strategies for its application and typical problems of its implementation. This includes a consideration of the tedious process of building inter-coder reliability within a team of researchers, who typically run the coding in a claims-making project. The strength and popularity of claims-making analysis can be explained by its capacity to bridge paradigms, among them most notably political science and institutional studies, media and communication studies and political sociology.
