Budget Rhetoric in Presidential Campaigns from 1952 to 2000

We offer a theory to identify the determinants of presidential campaign rhetoric related to the federal budget. The theory builds on the literature dealing with issue ownership, candidate strategy, retrospective voting, and voter preferences to generate eight hypotheses about the use of budget rhetoric. To test these hypotheses, over 800 campaign speeches from the major party presidential nominees from 1952 to 2000 are content analyzed. The content analysis generates measures of both the volume and tone of budget rhetoric. Volume is driven primarily by the objective balance of the budget and subjective importance given to it by voters and a conditional effect involving budget balance, incumbency, and partisanship. Tone is more complex, with positive rhetoric determined mostly by the budget balance and partisanship and overstated rhetoric shaped solely by the salience of the budget to the electorate. The article concludes with suggestions for future research.     

Narrative,Rhetorical Argument,and Ethical Authority

The great challenge of rhetorical argument is to make discourse ethical without making it less logical. This challenge is of central importance throughout the full range of practical argument, and understanding the relation of the ethical to the logical is one of the principal contributions the humanities, in this case the study of rhetoric, can make to legal scholarship. Aristotle’s Rhetoric shows how arguments can be ethical and can create ethical relations between speaker and hearer. I intend to apply Aristotle’s analysis to a phenomenon that did not yet exist for him, that of authority, by asking how the acts of asserting and accepting authority can be ethical acts. I take as a test case a peculiarly unfortunate and inept appeal to authority, that offered by the counsel for the District of Columbia in arguing Bolling v Sharp who cited Taney’s opinion in Dred Scott to clinch his point. By seeing just what goes wrong in such a maladroit appeal, I explore the rational, voluntary and ethical dimensions of a decision to accept a given commitment to authority. I use Joseph Raz’s analysis of authority and the relation of reason to authority, yet think I go beyond Raz by exploring the deliberate and voluntary nature of submission to authority. Choosing to be bound by an authority is an ethical act. As such it is always rational and yet never purely rational. The Supreme Court’s choice of authorities is part of its making itself into an authority, and is a paradigm of the ethical act of choosing to be obligated. Choosing to be committed or obligated is a central paradox of political theory and considerations of authority and obligation, at least since early social contract theorists. However, its importance for judicial reasoning, which at the same time chooses to submit to authority and itself becomes an authority, has not been noted. Consideration of the relations between the ethical and the logical can help us better to articulate the constitution of ethical authority. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

谁是叙述者？

“谁是叙述者”这个问题,对叙述者概念是虚构叙事的区别性内在代理者,提出质疑。这个概念曾经误导性地包含了虚构性。本文探讨了热奈特对叙述者类型的划分。在比较故事外的同质叙述者与故事的叙述者之后,认为所有叙述者和人物都在叙事中得到同等程度的再现。文章接着考量了故事外异质叙述者的情况,不仅研究了全知叙述和外聚焦的含义,而且也反驳了如下观点,即在这类叙事中,需要区别性叙述者,以便展示虚构的信息是已知的而不是想象的。在讨论作者对虚构话语的责任时,文章参照了言语行为理论,表明传统的虚构作品“假装”模式并不完善,一个可接受言语行为阐释不会假定有一个叙述者的存在,因此叙述者要么以角色身份,要么以作者身份出现。文章还讨论了针对本论点几种可能的反对意见：不可靠性的含义,关于局部叙述者和隐性叙述者的观点,以及隐含作者问题等。最后,本文简要阐明了该观点之于从修辞性角度而非从再现性角度来理解虚构作品的意义。     

THE REALITIES OF LAW ARE THE WINNING NARRATIVES — BASIC THESES FOR A REALISTIC AND RHETORICAL PHILOSOPHY OF LAW

This article begins explaining the Aristotelian reduction of rhetoric to persuasion, which came to determine Western tradition until modern times. To understand Aristotle’s methodology the author then wants to discuss the concept of enthymeme, the “rhetorical syllogism,” in Aristotle’s own words. In order to try a realistic critique on the Aristotelian rhetoric, more adequate to a rhetoric of modern law, the author will suggest three epistemological points of departure, three theses, and the three levels of rhetoric that support them.     

Imagining the law and the constitution of societal order in Los Angeles Police Chief William Parker＇s 1965 ＂Crime and the Great Society＂ address

Legal scholar James Boyd White has challenged both lawyers and rhetoricians to imagine the law as an enterprise of language. In contending that members of the legal profession should see law as an activity of speech and imagination occurring in a social world, he has urged lawyers to view the legal profession as an interaction of authoritative texts and as a process of legal thought and argument instead of thinking of law as a technical system of regulations and applying its rules in a mechanical way. By asking members of the legal professional to consider law as rhetoric, White has encouraged them to recognize the socially constitutive nature of language, which runs contrary to a perspective of law as machine or, rather, the law as only a mechanistic system of rules and regulations. His ideas have inspired the ＂law and literature＂ movement, which has motivated other scholars to analyze the texts of judicial opinions, for example, according to White＇s theories. However, this essay takes White＇s concept of imagining the law and applies it public address and, specifically, to the 1965 ＂Crime and the Great Society＂ speech given by former Los Angeles Police Chief William Parker. Chief Parker＇s address reveals a vision for the City of Los Angeles in which Parker, himself, asks his audience of citizens and civic leaders to share for advancing a specific agenda for law enforcement＇s role in society.     

The comparative effectiveness of populist rhetoric in generating online engagement

Worldwide, voters are supporting populist candidates who promise to upend “politics as usual.” Despite all we know about populism, we still do not know how individuals respond to populist content during campaigns, particularly compared to other common content in liberal democracies. This paper adapts framing theory to an online electoral context to argue that populist campaign messages will generate more online engagement compared to three alternative conceptions of the relationship between the people and the elites: pluralism, technocracy, and neutral messages. The paper adapts Snow and Benford's seminal 1988 theory of resonance to studies of populist communication and assess whether populism resonates more with online social media users. An original dataset using the campaign Tweets of 22 national-level actors across five countries is used to test the theory: Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Italy, and Spain (N = 1777). The findings suggest that citizens on Twitter engage with populism more than its alternatives in certain contexts.     

论言辞性法律修辞在法官判决书中的运用场域

法官在判决书中对于法律的适用和法律事实的认定,需要运用言辞性的法律修辞进行法律论证和叙事：一方面,结合具体的案情语境,对抽象法律原则加以准确的解释,对模糊的法律概念加以释明,对僵化的法律规则加以弥补;另一方面,将社会事实涵摄于法律规范抽象出的事实之下,借助说服因素所带来的情感认同、经验认同、法律认同。这在法律规范相对僵化、不确定,法律原则具有概括性,事实具有言辞依赖性的场域下,对于增强法律论辩和判决语言的说服力具有不可忽视的作用。     

Sémiotique et rhétorique de la duplicité dans la peinture de Bernard Baïfang

The Art of Bernard Baifang finds its strength in the subtlety with which this contemporary painter represents abstractions. Using figures of speech, he translates duplicity into images, a moral perversion that has become endemic in many African countries. A semiotic and rhetorical study of the figurations of duplicity in Feymania and La cité rouge reveals that the achievement of these paintings inspired by the experience of daily life in Cameroon is part of a subversive approach based on a cathartic conception of art.     

Three Historical Perspectives on Trump,the Presidency,and American Populism

This article attempts to set up a conversation between certain aspects of the considerable scholarship on rhetoric and populist identity, on the one hand, and the historical perspectives on American populism provided by Michael Kazin; Christopher Lasch and a recent set of studies of the history of presidential rhetoric. It ends with tentative reflections on the effects of these historical perspectives for contemporary discussions.     

司法修辞方法在社会正义实现中的作用

人们关于社会正义的认识是多元的,这要求居间作出的司法判决应当经得起理性论证的检验,以防范法官选择正义立场时的任意。经得起理性检验的判决又必须借助修辞方法的使用,才能使其为判决不利方接受。在社会正义的司法实现过程中,修辞具有重要的方法论作用,但它必须在法律论证框架下使用,才符合其秉承善意而加以应用的本质。