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ABSTRACT
Modern executive politics is characterised by blame games – offensive and defensive symbolic performances by various individual or collective social actors. In this article, I propose a discursive approach to analysing opposition–government blame games where top politicians try to persuade mass audiences to side with them in disputes over government's culpability by using carefully crafted written texts. Drawing insights and concepts from the tradition of discourse-historical studies into political communication as well as the recent literature on blame avoidance in government, I analyse conflicting opinion pieces published by the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition in the UK in the wake of the global financial crisis that developed since 2007. I present a basic functional argument model of attributing and avoiding blame, reconstruct the competing argumentation schemes that help us interpret public debates over the crisis, and show how blame is attached or deflected using various persuasive discursive devices, such as metaphors, lexical cohesion, and ways of framing and positioning, that underlie particular attacks, justifications, or excuses. In conclusion, I emphasise the importance of looking beyond the formal structure of the arguments to identify the more subtle emotional appeals used in government-related blame games.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Ruth Wodak for her helpful comments on earlier drafts, and I thank Bob Jessop and Doug Walton for useful suggestions at the outset of this work.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributor
Sten Hansson is developing new frameworks for analysing government communication, with a particular focus on conflicts, scandals, and blame games. His work has been published in Discourse & Society, the Journal of Pragmatics, the Journal of Language and Politics, Social Semiotics, and the Routledge Handbook of Language and Politics.
Notes
1 In the UK, the weekly session of the Prime Minister's Questions at the House of Commons is a parliamentary institution which has increasingly become a rowdy verbal battle between the Leader of the Opposition and the Prime Minister (Bates, Kerr, Byrne, & Stanley, Citation2014). Broadcast interviews with politicians often involve aggressive questioning by journalists who seek celebrity status through showing adversarial stance towards powerful officeholders (Clayman & Heritage, Citation2002).
2 There are many different tools and procedures that have been developed for diagramming and analysing arguments (see, e.g. Hitchcock & Wagemans, Citation2011; Rigotti & Morasso, Citation2010; van Eemeren & Snoeck Henkemans, Citation2017; Walton, Reed, & Macagno, Citation2008), and probably any of these could be fruitfully employed for the purpose of reconstructing the argumentative features of blaming and blame avoidance in political life. Here, I focus on Toulmin's model because it has been long adopted in public policy analysis (e.g. Dunn, Citation1981), but has not been widely applied to government blame games. The simplified Toulmin's model has been also advanced as a useful analytic device by Kienpointner (Citation1996), and employed by Forchtner (Citation2013) and Reisigl (Citation2014), among others, in discourse-historical studies that inform my current research.
3 Moreover, especially during prolonged arguments that unfold between adversarial parties over longer periods of time, the arguers may repeatedly alter any of the elements in their argument so that these would have a better ‘fit’ with other elements. For example, a blame maker may propose that the government deserves blame, but during the course of the debate realise that the data she can provide allows her to blame only a particular officeholder. So she may choose to revise her claim accordingly, that is, substitute the initial blame taker with a more ‘suitable’ one.
4 Even though the general comparison of the articles by Brown and Cameron is not really at issue in my analysis, it is worth pointing out some similarities in terms of their field of action, genre, and medium. Both articles serve the function of formation of public attitudes, opinion, and will (for this distinction, see Reisigl & Wodak, Citation2015). Both articles are relatively lengthy opinion pieces: The length of Cameron's article is 1062 words, and Brown's 945 words. And both articles were published in generalist, national, non-tabloid newspapers with similarly large readerships: the circulation figures were 644,828 for Sunday Telegraph (in September 2007) and 629,561 for The Times (in October 2008).
5 Notably, references to globalisation were relatively frequent in the rhetoric of the Labour Party even before the onset of the financial crisis. Based on her analysis of a 278,586-word corpus of various text collected from the Labour Party from 1994 to 2007, L’Hôte (Citation2014) concludes that ‘while globalisation is framed as an agent of progress in discourse, its negative aspects are given significant representation in new Labour discourse’, and that these negative aspects ‘are used as a rhetorical threat in order to legitimate the party's policy choices, domestically as well as internationally’ (p. 208). See also Atkins (Citation2011) for a qualitative study of the justificatory arguments employed by New Labour leaders over the years.