Elections and Political Persuasion

Psychologists have since the Second World War tried to decipher effective routes to persuasion. How do you convince a person of a position? How do you distinguish between a compliant act from a fully-fledged change in thinking? One of the common avenues of persuasion is through the study of identification. That is how does a politician make themselves relatable to their electorate, as ‘one of us’?

One of the overlooked areas of research in psychology, my colleagues and I argue, is the study of persuasion in political communication in and of itself. What is it about the talk of politicians that is designed to be persuasive? Or rather, since arguably everything a politician says is designed to be persuasive, what are the particular ways of talking that politicians use to sway the electorate in their favour? One such rhetorical tool is identification. In our project, titled “Persuasion through identification in political discourse” (funded by the British Psychological Society) we re-imagine the previously cognitive mechanism of identification as a way of talking. We return to this shortly.

Using rhetorical (Billig, 1991) and discursive (Edwards & Potter, 1992) psychology, we focus on the action orientation of talk. We pay particular attention to the rhetorical dimension of political communication, looking at how politicians do things with their talk. We jettison any speculation about how politicians might think, or how the audience might perceive their talk, and focus specifically on the observable matter at hand. For discursive psychologists language is not a window to the mind: how we speak is not determined by truth, or out thoughts. How we speak is determined by the minutiae of social norms that a particular situation demands or warrants. For example, it’s harder to turn down an invitation (let’s say for lunch) because a negative response is against the norms of agreement in how we speak. Yet, it’s so easy to say yes. The former needs to be justified, the latter does not.

To return to the world of politics. What interests us, then, is the detail of how politicians talk. And the details matter, for little words can say a great deal (Billig & Marinho, 2017) when it comes to politics. Billig and Marinho (2017) argue that it’s often difficult for a politician to persuade their ideological opponent. However, what they can do is display their self-persuasion which is designed to appeal to their own ideological side. This is where identification comes in. Politicians will appeal to widely held values and will appeal to them vaguely. This is to maximise the appeal of what they speak of. For example, they might suggest that the relevant aspect of a particular ‘hot’ topic lies elsewhere (e.g., Demasi, 2019; 2023; Litchfield et al., 2024), invoke numbers in a specific manner (e.g., Billig, 2021; Billig & Marinho, 2023), or invoke spurious claims made to look like truths (Demasi, 2020).

In our BPS funded project (see Litchfield et al., 2024) we analyse a couple of these examples. In one case, a politician suggests that those who criticise the Tory party on the grounds of their Brexit policy are missing the point and it is, in fact, the Tories who have a clear handle on a wide range of social issues. In another example, we look at how a Tory politician simultaneously seeks to invoke the values of caring for others and to exclude certain people from it – how caring for others is a middle class value directed at non-middle class people. It is not unusual in political discourse, or everyday conversations for that matter, for people to speak in a contradictory manner. The use of contradictory, untidy, language might on the surface appear to use lacking in some capacity. Yet it is precisely this that allows us to communicate in the first place.

What we must remember when we listen to the politicians, then, is not to think that their use of common sense is somehow good or bad (Burke & Demasi, 2023), that the use of numbers (Billig, 2021) or facts (Demasi, 2019) determine the correctness or success of a particular argument, or that a so-called decline in truth is, in fact, that (Demasi, 2020). What we should remember is that it’s not the job of a politician to tell us what is true; their job is to tell us which truths are relevant. Therein lies the role of ideology, and not just in political communication.

References

Billig, M. (1991). Ideology and opinions: Studies in rhetorical psychology. Sage Publications, Inc.

Billig, M. (2021). Rhetorical uses of precise numbers and semi-magical round numbers in political discourse about COVID-19: Examples from the government of the United Kingdom. Discourse & Society, 32(5), 542-558.

Billig, M., & Marinho, C. (2017). The politics and rhetoric of commemoration: How the Portuguese parliament celebrates the 1974 revolution. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Billig, M., & Marinho, C. (2023). Preventing the political manipulation of Covid-19 statistics: The importance of going beyond diplomatic language. Language in Society, 52(5), 733-755.

Burke, S. & Demasi, M.A. (2023). Communicating COVID-19: Accountability and ‘British Common Sense’, CADAAD.

Demasi, M.A. (2019). Facts as Social Action in Political Debates about Great Britain and the European Union. Political Psychology, 40(1), 3-20. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12496

Demasi, M.A. (2020). Post-truth Politics and Discursive Psychology. Social and Personality Psychology Compass. DOI: 10.1111/spc3.12556

Demasi, M.A. (2023). Accountability in the Russo-Ukrainian War: Vladimir Putin Versus NATO. Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, 29(3), 257-265. DOI: https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/pac0000653

Edwards, D., & Potter, J. (1992). Discursive psychology. Sage Publications, Inc.

Litchfield, P., Hunt, A.R., Demasi, M.A. & Humă, B. (2024). “Looking after the least fortunate in our society”. Shared membership, common-sense, and morality as resources for identification between politicians and voters. Social Psychological Review, 26(1). DOI: https://doi.org/10.53841/bpsspr.2024.26.1.18