Towards a holistic theory of speaker credibility

ABSTRACT

Recognising that the credibility of speakers is important, especially within the political context, this article argues that an adequate conceptualisation of the construct of speaker credibility is needed and that such a conceptualisation should be premised on an acceptable ethical framework. The article then evaluates the often used ethical systems and, subsequently, proposes criteria for ethically acceptable persuasive communication, to which political communication belongs. The major theoretical perspectives within which speaker credibility has been conceptualised, labelled structuralist, functionalist and constructivist, are critically evaluated. A holistic theoretical view of speaker credibility is then proposed, in which speaker credibility is understood as a construct with a hierarchically ordered stock of universal and context-specific dimensions of relational, content-related competence, performance and moral qualities.