Partisan Discourse,Polarization, and the Politics of Military Fatalities in Iraq

Public deliberation on the costs of war is important to democratic decision-making. This article explores congressional rhetoric about military fatalities within the U.S. House of Representatives and in television news media interviews from 2004 to 2006. In the House, the results are consistent with the “ideological opportunism” model of congressional rhetoric, which suggests that politicians–particularly the president’s partisan opponents–will be highly communicative about combat deaths in an effort to express ideological perspectives on war and criticize opponents’ positions. The results also show that as local combat fatalities accumulate, the president’s partisan opponents tend to become increasingly vocal about these deaths. The results do not support the “newsworthiness” model of congressional rhetoric in TV media interviews, which expects opposition party support and presidential party criticism of the president. Politicians on the far ends of the ideological spectrum dominate discussions about the loss of troops in the House, and politicians in both the House and TV news interviews advance largely unwavering partisan positions on the conduct of war. The findings suggest members of Congress reinforce political polarization in debates over the use of force.     

The Rhetoric of Educational Reform

This article is an examination of the language of recent large-scale education reform in England, New Zealand, and the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Manitoba. In each jurisdiction, we review both the official documents and the parliamentary debate around a set of major educational reforms, looking at both the similarities and differences between jurisdictions and at the overall nature of official discourse. Although some similar rhetoric was used in all four settings, we conclude that the differences in justifications were more significant than the commonalities. Our analysis supports a view of official rhetoric as being primarily symbolic and intended to create or support particular definitions of problems and solutions, but also as shaped by the historical context, institutional structure, and political culture of each setting.     

In a State?

There has been considerable discussion of the decline of the nation-state. It is important, however, to set claims that the nation-state is in decline in historical context and to distinguish processes of state adaptation to crises from changes in the power of the state. The popularity of anti-state rhetoric in the 1980s and 1990s led many to confuse changes in the modes of state activity, of which there is much evidence, with a decline in the significance of the state, for which there is much less evidence.     

Radical-right narratives in Slovakia and Hungary: historical legacies,mythic overlaying and contemporary politics

ABSTRACT

In the last several years, radical-right rhetoric has gained further ground in the political discourse of Slovakia and Hungary. This increasingly overt spiral of tension has been fuelled not only by radical-right actors, such as the Slovenská národná strana (SNS, Slovak National Party) and Jobbik (Movement for a Better Hungary), but also by mainstream parties such as SMER in Slovakia and Fidesz in Hungary. The legitimizing radical-right frames have mostly been founded on politicized historical narratives related to the intertwined processes of nation- and state-building in both countries. Pytlas seeks to describe and analyse this phenomenon, focusing on historical legacies, their mythologized reinterpretations as well as their application to contemporary politics. The debates on the Slovak language law of 2009 and the Hungarian citizenship law of 2010 shall be used as empirical examples of this ‘mythic overlaying’ mechanism.     

Framing and Deliberation: How Citizens' Conversations Limit Elite Influence

Public opinion research demonstrates that citizens' opinions depend on elite rhetoric and interpersonal conversations. Yet, we continue to have little idea about how these two forces interact with one another. In this article, we address this issue by experimentally examining how interpersonal conversations affect (prior) elite framing effects. We find that conversations that include only common perspectives have no effect on elite framing, but conversations that include conflicting perspectives eliminate elite framing effects. We also introduce a new individual level moderator of framing effects—called "need to evaluate"—and we show that framing effects, in general, tend to be short-lived phenomena. In the end, we clarify when elites can and cannot use framing to influence public opinion and how interpersonal conversations affect this process .     

Cheap talk,costly talk,crazy talk: patterns in North Korea’s English language propaganda*

This article examines the patterns in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s (North Korea’s) use of hostile rhetoric in its internationally-directed messaging. The article first places North Korea’s belligerent rhetoric in the context of that country’s capacity to threaten the US and its Northeast Asian allies; indeed many analysts worry that Pyongyang’s rhetoric represents a conflict escalation risk or even a casus belli. Following this, the article discusses the common explanations – irrationality/incompetence, lack of audience costs, inter alia – for why the North Korean regime employs such hostile rhetoric, and finds these explanations wrong or misleading. The main analysis section describes the results of a study of 10 years of English-language propaganda published by the KCNA (North Korea’s state news agency). A multiple regression model is used to test the relationship between North Korea’s hostile rhetoric and a set of independent variables. The statistical tests indicate a mixed correlation of North Korean rhetoric to the independent variables. One major finding is that there is no correlation between hostile North Korean rhetoric and the country’s kinetic provocations. The conclusion discusses the role that North Korea’s rhetoric plays within the country’s larger adversarial relationship to the US, South Korea, and Japan.     

Men and manners: Kantian humanism,rhetoric and the history of ethics

Modern humanist ethics (more Kantian than is sometimes thought) is driven by a will-to-perfection in the form of ideals of self-transcendence. This perfectionism entails a (would-be) exclusion or marginalisation of certain elements of ‘pre-Enlightenment’ ethical cultures bearing on rhetoric, manners and self-empowerment. This essay provides a set of conceptual-historical arguments preliminary to reinserting these disparaged elements into the forefront of a progressive ethos which, it is claimed, cannot afford to be exclusively dependent on an amalgam of Enlightenment and Romantic ideals. Ethics is irreducible to the realm of ideal and values, and there are other sorts.     

Rhetoric, Practice and the Dynamics of Institutional Change: Immigrant Policy in Sweden, 1964–2000

This article explains why different policy changes can occur on different institutional levels at the same time. I distinguish between the rhetorical and practical levels. Previous studies have described the different functions of rhetoric and practice: losses on one level can be compensated by gains on the other; to minimize conflicts between the two levels they are kept separate. However, no causal explanation of such decoupling has been suggested. I suggest that the reason why rhetoric and practice are decoupled is that they are evaluated in different ways: rhetoric is eva-luated in public political debates whereas practice is evaluated through government audits and different questions are asked in the two arenas. This argument is tested through a study of Swedish immigrant policies between 1964 and 2000. The main conclusion is that the rhetoric of immigrant policy has changed, whereas the practice of immigrant policy has not.     

Old and New Labour Narratives of Whitehall: Radicals,Reactionaries and Defenders of the Westminster Model

This article argues that throughout its history, the leadership of the Labour Party has chosen to embrace a benign view of the Civil Service, as part of a wider acceptance of the constitutional status quo reflected in the Westminster model. There has nevertheless been a long tradition in the wider Labour movement that has questioned whether Whitehall is capable of working for a government with radical aspirations. This article examines Labour's historical approach towards Whitehall, before reflecting on the extent to which the present Administration, while appealing to radical and reforming rhetoric has, like its predecessors, continued to embrace the status quo. It concludes by arguing that a contemporary and credible narrative capable of challenging the Westminster model has yet to emerge from the broader movement.     

Protecting the Common Good: Technology, Objectivity, and Privacy

The rhetoric of public policy after September 11 encourages us to believe that the preservation of freedom and the safety of the common good requires our universal acquiescence to technological invasions of privacy. The purpose of this article is simply to warn that the rhetoric of public policy solutions post–September 11 may be inconsistent with the philosophical and legal framework of American democracy. While serving as a solution today, this rhetoric may pose a devastating blow to the balance of individual privacy and common good that is essential to the preservation of freedom.     

Precedents,parliaments, and foreign policy: historical analogy in the House of Commons vote on Syria

Abstract

This analysis investigates the role of historical analogies in the influence that parliaments have in foreign policy. Our empirical focus is the UK Parliament’s unusual opposition to the Prime Minister on UK involvement in Syria in 2013. The vote challenges many conventional expectations about the role of parliament in security affairs. Important in this vote were lessons learned and strategically used from UK participation in the intervention of Iraq in 2003. This argument is developed theoretically based on research on historical analogies: parliaments, ‘learn’ (primarily negative) lessons about past foreign policy events which guide parliamentary preferences and procedures and can enhance parliaments’ role in subsequent foreign policy. The article contributes to research on analogies by extending the logic to lessons on process. This use of precedents can offer more structurally oriented perspectives that translate critical junctures into reforms in procedures and policy-making practices.     

Virtue,Interest, and Works in American Foreign Policy

Three questions shape American foreign policy: Is it right? Is it in the national interest? And does it work? “Right” is defined by the American ethos, sometimes called the civil religion. Self-interest and pragmatism characterize the other two elements. The interplay among these factors may be found most clearly in presidential rhetoric. After examining Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and Ronald Reagan, the article finds that while effective presidents have invoked a religiously based virtue, U.S. foreign policy itself tended to avoid religious issues. In contrast, President George W. Bush has relied on the American civil religion to combat Islamism. But his rhetoric “stretches too far” on democratic virtue at the expense of national interest and pragmatism. The article concludes that the U.S. civil religion, although based on theological ideas, does not travel well.     

Workforce Crisis in Residential Aged Care: Insights from Rural,Older Workers

In Australia, workforce shortages in residential aged care present a significant challenge for the aged care industry. The growing demand for workers in aged care, combined with the shrinking supply of younger workers entering the field, highlights a future workforce crisis. The current shortfalls are set to worsen with the retirement of a generation of women who have provided the backbone of the workforce. Although targeted retention of this group may alleviate this issue, few studies have explored the retirement decisions of this cohort. This paper reports on a qualitative study of this cohort of Victorian public sector residential aged care staff. Although current government rhetoric promotes intrinsic rewards (altruism, moral fulfilment) over extrinsic rewards (excessive workload, pay and conditions), a combination of these factors was associated with job satisfaction. It would seem timely to revisit some of these concerns to ensure an adequate and sufficiently skilled workforce.     

Historical apologies as acts of symbolic inclusion – and exclusion? Reflections on institutional apologies as politics of cultural citizenship

Institutional apologies for historical injustices can be conceived as acts of symbolic inclusion directed to people whose collective experiences and memories of the past have not been recognized in the hegemonic narratives of the past. However, in this article it is argued that such apologies also have exclusionary potential as vehicles of symbolic politics of citizenship in that they may designate the apologizing community, so that it effectively excludes cultural ‘aliens’, like migrants, from the community of ‘remedial’ citizens. The article suggests a crucial point is the rhetoric shifts when one is appealing to both cultural and political solidarity, as when apologizing in the name of the state but simultaneously invoking ‘our’ nation and ‘our’ history. Thus, the increasing number of institutional historical apologies is not necessarily incompatible with the trend of reinforcing the symbolic boundaries around ‘our’ historical–cultural communities that has been visible recently, e.g. in the demands for cultural canons and citizenship tests in many Western societies.     

Aristotelian framing: logos,ethos, pathos and the use of evidence in policy frames

In this research note, we propose to complement the analytical toolbox for framing analyses with the categories of Aristotelian rhetoric. As our case, we analyse the function of the use of evidence in frame building in the context of Swiss direct-democratic campaigns preceding votes on smoking bans. Based on rhetoric, a frame can be considered to contain three interrelated elements: (1) political arguments (logos), (2) cultural symbols (ethos), and (3) emotional appeal (pathos). By comparing evidence-based arguments with arguments that do not refer to evidence, the research note illustrates that backing arguments (logos) by evidence increases their trustworthiness (ethos) but not their emotional appeal (pathos). We consider the Aristotelian categories a fruitful tool to enlarge existing framing research with regard to the use of evidence.     

Politics in a Cold Climate: The Conservative Decline in Scotland

An important feature over the last 30 years has been the increasing shortfall in the Conservative vote in Scotland compared with England. The Conservative Party, despite social structural disadvantages in terms of housing tenure and social class, did unusually well until the mid-1950s, particularly among Unionists and Protestants. After considering the historical and religious factors explaining earlier Conservative political strength, it is argued that two factors help to explain the changing politics of the state in Scotland: the establishment of Scotland as a separate unit of economic management in popular perception and the greater dependence on direct state involvement. The Scottish economic dimension has made Scotland an ideological category largely incompatible with Conservative English/British national rhetoric as employed by Mrs Thatcher.     

Persuasion,power and the conversational model

Several lines of study in the humanities and social sciences have drawn on the systematic analysis of the craft of persuasion given by texts in the rhetorical tradition. This review considers the usefulness of this tradition to a critical approach to relations between discourse and power. The books under review use rhetoric in literary study, in social psychology, and in studies of argument in a variety of social sciences, with varying degrees of success. I argue that rhetoric cannot provide a general methodology or basis for a political critique, but is can be useful if studies take into account the institutions in which discourse takes place, the conflicts constituting these institutions, and the excluded participants. Judging from the books under review, applications of the rhetorical tradition work best when they remain close to the practical problems of persuasion in a specific situation.     

Towards the Vernacular,Away from Politics? Political History after the ‘New Political History’

This article considers how modern British political history has changed since the ‘new political history’ of the 1990s. It focusses on the ‘vernacular’ histories which have emerged in the last decade or so. The vernacular ‘turn’ is frequently framed by its proponents in opposition to the new political history, with its focus on the rhetoric of politicians and subsequent tendency to reproduce the perspectives of political elites. This article, however, identifies continuities between these approaches, noting their shared interest in advancing a more complex understanding of the relationship between politics and people in the past. It argues that the real challenge posed by the vernacular lies in the necessary reckoning with the ‘apartness’ of politics from the perspective of ordinary people. Yet here too, this piece suggests, the vernacular turn can be seen as the latest stage in a continual rethinking of the relationship between political, social and cultural history.     

Strangled at birth: the One Nation ideology of Theresa May

ABSTRACT

Contemporary and retrospective evaluation of Theresa May’s premiership inevitably focuses on the division, drift and indecision which characterized it. However, this article argues that although such narratives have considerable validity, they miss an important aspect of the May ‘project’, namely, its attempt to shift the contemporary Conservative Party’s ideology in a ‘One Nation’ direction in rhetoric if not necessarily in deed. The article begins with a conceptual and historical analysis of One Nation Conservatism and then places May within this tradition, principally through consideration of key statements she made as Prime Minister. It, therefore, adds an original perspective both on May’s government and on the ideological analysis of One Nation Conservatism, building on the existing literature.