THE LANGUAGE OF POLITICAL PERSUASION: THREE CASE STUDIES EXPLORING “RHETORIC OF COERCION”

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Date
2014-05-27
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Johns Hopkins University
Abstract
Does specific rhetoric from leaders have a direct impact on influencing others? In their 2007 essay “Twisting Tongues and Twisting Arms”, Ronald R. Krebs and Patrick Thaddeus Jackson introduce a matrix which classifies the outcome of a political rhetorical campaign as either Policy Change, Mixed, Implications Contest, or Framing Contest. The matrix measures the rhetorical arguments of a Claimant (C) against the response of the Opposition (O), particularly when played out in front of the Public (P). Using three distinct case studies, the applicability and utility of their matrix is tested against a number of different types of scenarios. Case Study 1 applies the matrix to President Ronald Reagan’s State of the Union Addresses where he attempts to bring the American public around to his new policy of “rollback”. Case Study 2 analyses the differences between protest rhetoric in 1988-89 Poland and 2011 Tunisia to determine if certain types of protest rhetoric are more persuasive than others. Finally the third Case Study applies the matrix to rhetoric between Georgia and Russia in the months leading up to the 2008 war, to determine if Georgia is able to successfully persuade Russia to change their policy when publicly shamed. Each Case Study produced a different result, however the real question is whether the Krebs-Jackson formula is a successful measure of C’s rhetoric when attempting to influence O. It was determined that while it can be difficult to pinpoint the correlation or causation between C’s rhetoric and O’s response, the formula is an exceptionally useful tool to organize and clarify obscure political rhetoric.
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Keywords
Rhetoric, coercion, language, political communication, political science, geopolitics, persuasion, case studies
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