Multivocality and robust action dynamics in political discourse

Highlights

• Political actors follow a dual strategy in discourse, switching between exploration and exploitation.

• Political actors shift their discourse positions in response to more talk from opposing sides.

• Dominant discourse positions are multivocal, composed of multiple frames.

• Multivocal positions can significantly reduce speech acts from opposing actors, and thus are potent tools to keep the floor in political discourse.

Abstract

How do politicians gain an upper hand in political discourse? Recent literature on framings in political discourse have re-directed attention from static models of issue ownership to more interactive models of strategic framing contests. This article proposes a robust action approach to the tactical horizon of political discourse dynamics, and tests hypotheses about the dual repertoires of local action: First, we test for the presence of exploratory local action, when discourse positions are altered in response to positions by others. Second, we show evidence for the presence of role claim behavior, when a multivocal dominant discourse position is taken, and suppresses participation from others. It is multivocality, rather the amount of speech that has a silencing effect. Using the case of economic policy discourse in Hungary in 1997, we show how the “GDP growth” discourse position silenced opposition positions on the right, mostly built from stigmatizing frames. Discourse positions beyond the one built around growth did not silence alternative framings, but elicited discourse shifts. We coded 8632 utterances over 100 days of discourse into a two-mode network of speech acts and statements and used a two-mode blockmodeling approach to identify positions and frames. We took a pooled time series approach to test hypotheses of local action dynamics. We found evidence for both exploratory local action and role claim, while controlling for observed and unobserved heterogeneity at the actor level.

Introduction

How do politicians gain an upper hand in political discourse? Political discourse is an arena where power is maintained and generated (van Dijk & Teun, 1993; Fairclough, 2013; Thornborrow, 2016), and this process can be understood as a framing contest (Cornelissen & Werner, 2014; Dewulf et al., 2009; Kaplan, 2008), where political actors dynamically adjust their behavior to respond to speech acts from their opponents (Krebs & Jackson, 2007). In this article we adopt a relational robust-action perspective to discourse, as we argue that political actors engage in framing contests by choosing between two kinds of behaviors: First, speakers are interested in exploring the repertoires of their opponents, aiming to make them shift through their discursive positions and thus reveal the full repertoire of their framings (Leifer, 1988; Steinberg, 1999). Second, beyond such exploration political actors are ultimately interested in gaining the upper hand in discourse by taking a position that their opponents have no viable answer to (Koopmans & Olzak, 2004; Nelson & Kinder, 1996; Schröter and Taylor 2018), thus speakers aim to switc from exploration to exploitation. In sum, political actors engage in discourse with a behavioral portfolio similar to that of a boxer, starting with an exploratory dance around the opponent, looking for the opportunity to deliver a punch (Wacquant, 1995).

Understanding political discourse requires a model of discourse dynamics. One perspective to understand the connection between political parties and discourse relies on the concept of issue ownership: relatively stable affiliations of parties with issues that align with their voter base (Petrocik, 1996; Rokkan et al., 1999). However, there is much evidence for a relationship between parties and issues that is much more dynamic and competitive (Meguid, 2005; Sniderman et al., 2004), with challenger parties bringing about disruptive innovations in framings (De Vries & Hobolt, 2020; Hobolt & Tilley, 2016). In line with broader transformations, as the political field shifted from class-based party politics to issue-based party politics over the past half century, understanding dynamics in issue representation beyond issue ownership is now a key task (Green-Pedersen, 2019).

This article presents a sociological analysis of political discourse dynamics by relying on a rich literature in political and cultural sociology that re-constructs discourse as a temporal symbolic network (Carley, 1994; Foucault, 1972; Mohr, 1998), to understand relations of power in the political field (Benford, 1993; Bourdieu, 1991). Our key contribution is that we shift focus to robust action in discourse dynamics as relational drama (McFarland, 2004), rather than adopting the more usual focus on the reception of political frames by the audience (De Sio & Weber, 2014; Vasi et al., 2015): in our study discourse positions are both the dependent and independent variables (Snow et al., 2004), as we aim to understand strategic interaction of political rivals (Krebs & Jackson, 2007; Mische & Pattison, 2000; Steinberg, 1999).

Robust action perspectives carry a lot of promise to conceptualize political discourse, but their key concepts are often difficult to operationalize, such as opaqueness, ambiguity, and seizing the moment (Ferraro et al., 2015; Padgett & Ansell, 1993). We rely on the concept of local action¹ (Leifer, 1988) and symbolic network analytic methods to provide a clear operationalization for robust action in political discourse. We distinguish two modes of acting: local action, when actors explore role repertoires of adversaries, and role claim, when an actor attempts to occupy a dominant discourse position. We argue that this idea of local action is a fruitful way to combine a structural analysis of symbols and speech acts with a relational analysis of political organizations struggling for power (Emirbayer & Goodwin, 1994; Erikson, 2016).

Our empirical case is the economic policy discourse of consolidation in Hungary, over the spring of 1997. During this period government side political actors (and other expert and journalist discourse participants mostly on the left) shifted from defending austerity measures to an offensive built on the idea of GDP growth. With this they defeated a stigmatizing offensive launched by young Viktor Orban and the FIDESZ party, that recently veered to the right. Using a two-mode blockmodeling approach to identify discourse positions, we show that this innovation relied on the most multivocal position in the discourse, combining several frames in a way, that silenced opposition positions. While all other government and opposition side positions had a clear answer in the discourse, and did not significantly reduce the probability of speaking, the position on GDP growth significantly reduced the probability of speaking, regardless of the identity of actor. In a fashion that paralleled the world economic policy stage (Schmelzer, 2016), growth discourse in our case connected macroeconomic indicators with individual prosperity in a uniquely effective way².

We translate our textual corpus into a network, building from ties among statements (the elementary symbols in this article) that are made when a political actor uses two or more statements in the same speech act. Taking the resulting two-mode network of statements connected with speech acts, we use a two-mode blockmodeling approach to reveal frames and positions – clusters of structurally equivalent statements and speech acts, respectively. A frame is a typical kind of building block, while a position is an actual construction out of frames. A position can build from one frame only (with little multivocality), or it can be composed of multiple frames, and thus be multivocal.

We then analyze the relational dynamics of using these positions to test hypotheses about the presence of a local action dynamic in the discourse. First, we test a weak hypothesis of dynamics, H1, that the prevalence of discourse positions significantly differs from expected in the relevant temporal window following other positions. Second, we test stronger hypotheses about local action, taking a pooled time series approach with actor-days as units of analysis. The first set of stronger hypotheses are about exploratory local action, stating the expectation that politicians will alter their discourse positions in response to what had been said in a preceding time window. We expect that it is the amount said on the other side (rather than multivocality) that induces position shifts. The second set of stronger hypotheses expect significant reduction in the number of speech acts (become silenced) when the opposing side takes a multivocal position, bridging frames. We expect that it is the multivocality (rather than the amount of speech on the other side) that silences politicians.