Political discourse and the relevance of rhetoric

The preceding chapter has discussed the relationship between discourse and politics. It has outlined the crucial and original contribution of discourse analysis in linguistics and social psychology to the study of political language. In this chapter the discussion is broadened to how social and political psychologists have traditionally approached the issue of persuasive communications, and some examples are given of how they treat language and rhetoric. The remainder of the chapter includes a discursive analysis of two selected aspects of political rhetoric: the use of metaphors and identification with an audience. The chapter closes with a discussion of the crucial task of moving towards a genuine political psychology of political rhetoric by anchoring it in the detailed study of the public use of language.

It is perhaps a truism to affirm that in politics, as in other realms of social life, rhetorical commitment and debate are necessary ingredients. Arguably, the political importance of rhetoric and dialogue is a position that does not often require justification. What does require justification is the way in which one thinks about and approaches it empirically. The term ‘political rhetoric’ refers both to the ways in which politicians try to persuade various audiences and to the (academic) study of such oratory (see Billig, 2003; Condor et al., in press). This chapter approaches political rhetoric in the spirit that Aristotle (trans. 1909) first championed. This is an analytic spirit, where the focus is on discovering ‘the available means of persuasion in each case’ (p. 5). This chapter suggests that the phenomenon of political persuasion ‘calls for a psychological approach that is itself rooted within the study of rhetoric’ (Billig, 2003, p. 223).

Psychology and politics

The American political scientist Charles E. Merriam described psychology as a ‘kindred’ science (Merriam, 1924). McGuire (1993) writes about the ‘long affair’ between psychology and political science underpinned by frequent transformation of topics, procedures and theories. What Merriam and McGuire have in common is that they understand the relationship between psychology and politics as the study of ‘political behaviour’. A variety of ‘definitions’ of this relationship has been suggested. For example, Sears et al. (2003) see the relationship between psychology and politics as the ‘application of what is known about human psychology to the study of politics’ (p. 3). For others, it is about discerning how ‘human cognition and emotion mediate the impact of the environment on political action’ (Stein, 2002, p. 108). According to Lavine (2010), the relationship is ‘defined by a bidirectional influence: just as the psyche influences political orientation, the polity leaves its mark on who we are’ (p. xx, emphasis in original).

This book does not attempt to offer yet another definition. Instead, it tries to qualify the relationship between psychology and politics by proposing alternative approaches, different conceptual tools and a different vision of human psychology and political behaviour with roots in epistemological, theoretical and methodological presuppositions arising from the discursive (Billig, 1987; Harré and Gillett, 1994; Middleton and Edwards, 1990), narrative (Bruner, 1986; Polkinghorne, 1988) and sociocultural (Middleton and Brown, 2005; Valsiner, 2007; Wertsch, 2002) turns in psychology, the human and the social sciences, giving rise to what can be broadly termed an interpretive political psychology. An interpretive political psychology suggests that political psychologists can attain a deep level of understanding of political behaviour by researching different social and political orders – discursive, cultural and semiotic – in their own terms. When political psychologists research attitudes, racism, public opinion, political ideology, and so on, they are, arguably, describing universalistic and particularistic presuppositions of modern culture. An interpretive political psychology likens the work of the political psychologist to that of the anthropologist who uncovers the various meaning-making layers through which society is organised and reproduces itself (Moscovici, 1972).

As the preceding pages have shown, one can gain a deeper understanding of political behaviour and the strength and utility of political psychology by emphasising its diversity of perspectives. Of course, the global world of political psychology extends beyond the boundaries of Europe and North America. Issues, topics, innovations in political psychology are not limited to what European academics and their North American colleagues choose to study. Nor are they limited to psychological issues. Around the world, new and creative ways of understanding the different manifestations of political behaviour are being developed: some are simply borrowing the models and the tools of their more prestigious American colleagues; others proceed independently, developing critiques, finding new gaps and imagining new research tools and hypotheses more suited to researching local social and political contexts. One of the major challenges of political psychology rests with how best to promote alternative ways of doing political psychology.

In its search for integrated and integrative perspectives, contemporary political psychology (especially in North America) is preoccupied with devising new technologies of research that can potentially change or transform the i eld. There is nothing wrong with this approach. The conceptual tools of cognitive science, evolutionary science, genetics, or the tools of neuroscience are pushing political psychology in new exciting directions. But problems can arise when this approach is used to predict and prescribe the future of political psychology. There is a lot of truth in Helen Haste’s statement: ‘predicting the future is hazardous; prescribing the future is a doomed exercise’ (2012, p. 1). It remains to be seen whether the future of political psychology lies with a dialogue with cognitive science, evolutionary science, or the neurosciences, especially when these approaches are drawn upon uncritically. This dialogue can potentially turn political psychology into a system governed by the problems and priorities of other fields. What we can be sure of, nonetheless, is that, as political psychologists, we can always turn to the lives of ‘concrete’ human beings, to describing and interpreting their social practices, social interactions, motivations, representations, as they appear to them in their full contingency.

Personality, political behaviour and the predisposition to intolerance

When political psychologists turn to the study of intolerance, they seem to be mostly preoccupied with what Allport has called ‘the horizontal dimensions that run through all individuals’ (1962, p. 409). Allport was writing about what psychologists routinely refer to as traits, predispositions, cognitions and motives that describe the ‘personality’ of individuals. What Allport described using a spatial metaphor is described by contemporary political psychology in not so different terms, as a ‘multifaceted and enduring internal, or psychological, structure’ (Mondak, 2010, p. 6). This chapter argues that although the influences of Allport’s ‘horizontal dimensions’ are some of the most discernible and significant, they are not the sole determinant of intolerance. This chapter contends that the nature of intolerance (and associated phenomena such as racism and moral exclusion) cannot be reduced to relatively stable inner predispositions or basic personality dispositions, and that the leaning of political psychologists to elucidate the general regularities of political behaviour can be profitably balanced, complemented by attention to culture, language, social interaction and the actual ways in which intolerance is enacted and accomplished by different ways of talking and behaving towards others.

In order to develop this argument this chapter discusses the appeal and manifestations of right-wing extremism in Western Europe, prejudice as collaborative accomplishment, and the extreme, moral exclusionary discourse against the Roma minority in Eastern Europe. One cannot understand fully the plural and contextual manifestations of intolerance if one only studies it as a predisposition underpinned by an authoritarian mindset. Intolerance needs to be studied in its own right – as it manifests itself, and as it is interpreted and enacted by social and political actors in social interaction and social practices. Intolerance is imbued with a variety of sociocultural meanings; it is the foundation and product of social activities.

The collective will and the ‘ideal’ democratic citizen

‘We, the people, feel and know that we have become more significant than ever before, with the narrowing of the barrier that separates “us” and our range of experiences from our elected representatives and their range of experiences.’ This is what social psychologist, Hadley Cantril, in his 1942 paper, ‘Public Opinion in Flux’, was writing about the importance of ‘good morale’ in American democracy, especially ‘national morale’ associated with the war effort. What Cantril acknowledged in 1942 (and he was not the only one) is what politicians, ‘spin doctors’, and so on take for granted today: the fundament of democracy lies in the ‘faith in the judgment of the common man’. Cantril was writing about the person, the ‘citizen’ who ‘given sufficient facts and motivated to pay attention to those facts … will reach a decision based on his [her] own self-interest as a member of a democratic community’ (1942, p. 151). When writing about ‘we, the people’ Cantril points to the direction of political democratic accountability (from citizens to their elected representatives) and thus brings into the foreground one of the most fundamental political hopes – that the will and reason of ‘the people’ ought to prevail. Cantril’s words express faith in the self-governing, autonomous and omnicompetent citizen (Dalton, 2008) – the ‘ideal’ democratic citizen.

This chapter shows how political psychologists’ concern with the ‘collective will’ is paralleled by a concern with, search for and description of the democratic citizen. The first part of the chapter maps the various meanings and expressions of this collective will condensed into the notion of ‘public opinion’. The chapter then goes on to describe the main assumptions behind researching and understanding the democratic competence of citizens, especially those related to political knowledge and political sophistication.

Mediated politics and political communication

The spectacle of contemporary politics around the world is intimately bound to a ‘multiaxial’ (Delli Carpini and Williams, 2001) media and communication environment. The nature of contemporary political communication is in continuous transformation (Bennett and Iyengar, 2008). This chapter offers a summary of the main tenets of a discursive approach to political communication. It starts by charting the strengths and weaknesses of contemporary psychology of political communication. The chapter then moves on to discuss how political communication can be conceived of as a social accomplishment, and an outcome of, as well as influence on, complex forms and networks of social practices. After offering some empirical examples drawn from work on the ethnography of political processes, discursive research on politicians’ communicative style, political advertising and political humour, the chapter closes with an outline of an alternative approach to political communication that relies specifically on the importance of investigating how political communications are actually produced, circulated and consumed in society. In doing so, this chapter argues that political psychologists can borrow creatively and learn from media, communication and discourse theorists interested in the complexity of political communications.

The rise of ‘self-expressive politics’ (Stanyer, 2007), the increased ‘personalisation’ (Castells, 2011) and ‘professionalisation’ of politics and political communication (Negrine, 2008; Wodak, 2011) are only some examples of how political phenomena do not exist outside communication processes, outside information and communications of and about politics. Politics and political processes need to be ‘packaged’ (Cappella and Jamieson, 1997; Franklin, 2004) in some communicative form or other in order to reach imagined, proximal or distal audiences. In most Western and Eastern European democracies, this is usually the job of politicians themselves, the mass media, ‘spin doctors’ and the increasingly powerful political public relations industry. Their role is to construct, direct, circulate and disseminate political communications (McNair, 2011).

Mass subjectivity and the democratic competence of nations

As argued in Chapter 1, citizens and publics inhabit ‘a political environment where they are continually encouraged by various actors to vocalize their views’ (Stanyer, 2007, p. 157). Some of the ‘actors’ to which Stanyer refers are academic psychologists, experts in public opinion polling who are interested in the aggregate description and distribution of the various dimensions of social and political behaviour: attitudes, motives, preferences, wishes, value orientations, and so on. Value orientations are perhaps the most important to understanding issues around political attitudes, social and political change, and political participation (Inglehart, 2009).

This chapter sketches the various attempts at describing the universal psychological structure of human values and the implications of such attempts for understanding democracy promotion and democratisation. It explores the tension between aggregate and universalistic models and contingent, contextual, particularistic manifestations of political behaviour. By focusing on the issue of questioning democracy promotion, this chapter shows how value orientations cannot be satisfactorily conceptualised outside an inter-subjective framework and ordinary ways of reasoning about values. The promotion of ‘formal democracy’ cannot work outside the framework of mass values offered by the existing socio-political context. The chapter ends by arguing that values should be treated as ideologically and culturally situated argumentative resources, and that researchers should emphasise not only their universalistic, but also their particularistic features, especially the fragmentary, multiple and unfinished nature of value searches, value expressions and value orientations.

From the archive model of memory to lived experience

Memory is at the centre of human experience. Memory is what makes us human. The past is a site of social meaning. These are statements with which the majority of psychologists agree. The truth of these statements rests on two fundamental questions: (a) how to study memory by incorporating the tension and interplay between preservation and loss, remembering and forgetting, the relationship between memory, identity and narrative: and (b) how to reconcile the distinction between memory as individual faculty, and memory as collective or social phenomenon. This chapter outlines some of the issues that arise from various attempts to find answers to these questions, especially those with particular relevance to political psychology. This chapter presents the main tenets of a sociocultural approach to researching social memory, with an emphasis on political narratives, commemoration and national memory of socio-political events and coming to terms with the past. The chapter ends with a brief outline of implications (and recommendations) for a political psychology of collective memory.

In his book The Sense of an Ending, British novelist Julian Barnes writes: ‘As the witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty as to what you are or have been.’ The quotation expresses, in a nutshell, the contingency of selfhood. What it intimates is that biographical time does not correspond exactly to biographical reality, but to the multiple reconstructions of the unfolding past/time by people. What Barnes has found, as so many of us have, is that what we call ‘individual memory’ about one’s life appears only apparently as a ‘property’ of the self. Instead we find it distributed beyond one’s own person, ‘beyond one’s head’ (Bruner, 2001), as it were, and mediated by personal and social relationships, and the material environment. Our relationship to the past and others is an unfinished business. Our memories (and identities) are not essences we carry within us, but rather a result of particular configurations and constellations of the subject in relation to networks of distributed and mediated activities. Our memories are located within mental, material and cultural spaces.