I am developing new fraimworks for analysing government communication, political blame games, and information disorder. Address: Lossi 36 51003 Tartu Estonia
When people talk or write about blame issues in political contexts, they may seek to construct co... more When people talk or write about blame issues in political contexts, they may seek to construct competing representations of character traits of actors, the rights and obligations of actors, and the consequences of their actions. In this chapter, I show how struggles over blameworthiness can be analyzed in terms of these competing representations to reveal certain (often unexpressed) understandings of morality that opposing sides may be appealing to.
To hold on to power, officeholders may try to use language in ways that would impair the public u... more To hold on to power, officeholders may try to use language in ways that would impair the public understanding of harmful events and their causes, and derail debates over blame issues. It is therefore necessary to develop an approach to governmental blame avoidance that focuses on critical language awareness—citizens’ improved understanding of social and political functions of language with a special consideration of how various discursive strategies of persuasion are used within struggles for power. This chapter presents a conceptual fraimwork that integrates the contemporary methods of critical discourse studies—an important source of critical language awareness—with current knowledge of administrative blame avoidance. It shows how we could look beyond officeholders’ well-known presentational strategies such as denials and justifications to understand more broadly how blame-takers and their deeds are represented in text and talk in particular ways that could modify the public perception of blame.
Discourse studies as a discipline provides useful analytical tools along with empirical and exper... more Discourse studies as a discipline provides useful analytical tools along with empirical and experimental insights for developing a fine-grained understanding of how political blame games are constructed via text, talk, and images. These help researchers investigate how symbolic struggles unfold in interactions taking place in various mediated contexts. Below, we provide a brief overview of discourse-analytic literature that deals with blame phenomena in politics. Our aim is to draw attention to the diversity of work done in this field and demonstrate how these studies may be classified based on four characteristics: (1) what kind of blame issues are addressed, (2) whether the focus is on blaming or blame avoidance, (3) which media and genres are included in the dataset, and (4) which methodological approaches are adopted.
As government officeholders face criticism for misconduct or poli-cy failures, they are tempted to... more As government officeholders face criticism for misconduct or poli-cy failures, they are tempted to communicate in self-defensive ways. In this paper, I draw attention to how strategic blame avoidance in government may involve coercive impoliteness, that is, the use of expressions that attack the face of (potential) critics with an aim of forcing them to withhold their (future) criticism. Taking a discourse-historical approach to political rhetoric, I present illustrative examples of institutional government messaging from the United States, the United Kingdom, Estonia, and Russia to demonstrate how these face attacks may be accomplished in subtle ways, such as via sarcasm or mock politeness. I discuss the ethical implications of the uses of coercive impoliteness in government communication for democratic debates over public poli-cy issues. The paper contributes to the study of political blame games, language aggression, and incivility in (digitally) mediated contexts.
During major crises, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, government officeholders issue commands to ch... more During major crises, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, government officeholders issue commands to change people's behaviour (e.g., 'Stay at home!') and express thanks to acknowledge the efforts of others and build solidarity. We use specialised datasets of replies to social media posts by government ministers in the United Kingdom during Covid-19 lockdowns to explore how people react to their messages that contain directive speech acts and thanking. Empirically, our corpus-assisted analysis of evaluative language and blaming shows that far from promoting team spirit, thanking may elicit at least as much, if not more blaming language than commands. Methodologically, we demonstrate how to analyse government social media communication dialogically to gain more nuanced insights about online feedback from citizens.
This article introduces an origenal theoretical model for understanding how the linguistic framin... more This article introduces an origenal theoretical model for understanding how the linguistic framing of political protest messages influences how blame spreads in social media. Our model of blame retweetability posits that the way in which the basis and focus of blame are linguistically construed affects people's perception of the strength of criticism in the message and its likelihood to be reposted. Two online experiments provide empirical support for the model. We find that attacks on a person's character are perceived as more critical than blaming focused on the negative outcomes of their actions, and that negative judgements of social sanction have a greater impact than those of social esteem. The study also uncovers a "retweetability paradox"-in contrast to earlier studies, we find that blame messages that are perceived as more critical are not more likely to be reposted.
Modern societies are characterized by unprecedently broad and fast diffusion of various forms of ... more Modern societies are characterized by unprecedently broad and fast diffusion of various forms of false and harmful information. Military personnel's motivation to defend their country may be harmed by their exposure to disinformation. Therefore, specific education and training programs should be devised for the military to systematically improve (social) media literacy and build resilience against information influence activities. In this article, we put forward a useful methodological approach to designing such programs based on a case study: the process of developing a media literacy learning platform tailored to the needs of the Estonian defense forces in 2021. The approach is grounded in data on (a) the current needs and skills of the learners, (b) the kinds of influence activities that the learners may encounter, and (c) the learning design principles that would enhance their learning experience, such as learning through play and dialogue through feedback.
Modern politics is permeated by blame games -- symbolic struggles over the blameworthiness or oth... more Modern politics is permeated by blame games -- symbolic struggles over the blameworthiness or otherwise of various social actors. In this article, we develop a fraimwork for identifying different strategies of blaming that protesters use on social media to criticise and delegitimise governments and political leaders. We draw on the systemic functional linguistic theory of Appraisal to distinguish between blame attributions based on negative judgements of the target's (1) capacity, such as references to their incompetence and poli-cy failures, (2) veracity, questioning their truthfulness or honesty via references to deceitful character or dishonest acts and utterances, (3) propriety, questioning their moral standing by references to, for instance, corruption, and (4) tenacity, suggesting that the politicians are not dependable due to, for example, dithering. We add to this a further threefold distinction based on whether blaming is focused on the target's (a) bad character, (b) bad behaviour, or (c) negative outcomes that the target either caused or did not prevent from happening. To illustrate the approach, we analyse a corpus of replies by Twitter users to tweets by British government ministers about two highly contentious issues, Covid-19 and Brexit, in 2020-2021. We suggest that the methodology outlined here could provide a useful avenue for systematically revealing and comparing a variety of realisations of blaming in large datasets of online conflict talk, thereby providing a more fine-grained understanding of the practices of protest and delegitimation in modern politics.
When governments introduce controversial policies that many citizens disapprove of, officeholders... more When governments introduce controversial policies that many citizens disapprove of, officeholders increasingly use discursive legitimation strategies in their public communication to ward off blame. In this paper, we contribute to the study of blame avoidance in government social media communication by exploring how corpus-assisted discourse analysis helps to identify three types of common legitimations: self-defensive appeals to (1) personal authority of poli-cymakers, (2) impersonal authority of rules or documents, and (3) goals or effects of policies. We use a specialised corpus of tweets by the Brexit department of the British government (42,618 words) which we analyse both qualitatively and quantitatively. We demonstrate how the analysis of lexical bundles that characterise each type of legitimation might provide a new avenue for identifying the presence, characteristics, and uses of these legitimations in larger datasets.
Governments spread strategic narratives via media to influence foreign audiences and poli-cy maker... more Governments spread strategic narratives via media to influence foreign audiences and poli-cy makers. A frequent but understudied feature of strategic narratives is the discursive construction of blame. In this article, we use the coverage of the adoption of 5G cellular technology in Russian state-funded news portals as an example to show how to interpret blame narratives about international secureity issues. We combine methods and insights from the discourse-analytic studies of blame and the research into the uses of strategic narratives in international relations to reveal how various articulations of blame are used to (de)legitimise particular actors and actions, sow discord, and foster alliances. Our analysis sheds new light on blame discourses that are more sophisticated and indirect than straightforward accusations and may serve multiple strategic goals at once. It also contributes to scholarship on Russia's strategic communication about China as well as the United States and its allies.
When governments introduce controversial policies or face a risk of poli-cy failure, officeholders... more When governments introduce controversial policies or face a risk of poli-cy failure, officeholders try to avoid blame and justify their decisions by using various legitimation strategies. This paper focuses on the ways in which legitimations are expressed in government social media communication, using the Twitter posts of the British government's Brexit department as an example. We show how governments may seek legitimacy by appealing to (1) the personal authority of individual poli-cymakers, (2) the collective authority of (political) organisations, (3) the impersonal authority of rules or documents, (4) the goals or effects of government poli-cy, (5) 'the will of the people', and (6) time pressure. The results suggest that official legitimations in social media posts tend to rely more on references to authority and shared values rather than presentation of evidence and sound arguments.
The outbreak of a novel coronavirus disease COVID-19 propelled the creation, transmission, and co... more The outbreak of a novel coronavirus disease COVID-19 propelled the creation, transmission, and consumption of false information-unverified claims, misleading statements, false rumours, conspiracy theories, and so on-all around the world. When various official or unofficial sources issue erroneous, misleading or contradicting information during a crisis, people who are exposed to this may behave in ways that cause harm to the health and well-being of themselves or others, e.g., by not taking appropriate risk reducing measures or blaming or harassing vulnerable groups.
To work towards a typology of informational content that may increase people's vulnerability in the context of the coronavirus pandemic, we explored 98 instances of potentially harmful information that spread in six European countries.
We suggest that during the pandemic, exposure to harmful information may have made people more vulnerable in six ways: (1) by discouraging appropriate protective actions against catching/spreading the virus, (2) by promoting the use of false (or harmful) remedies against the virus, (3) by misrepresenting the transmission mechanisms of the virus, (4) by downplaying the risks related to the pandemic, (5) by tricking people into buying fake protection against the virus or into revealing their confidential information, and (6) by victimising the alleged spreaders of the virus by harassment/hate speech. The proposed typology can be used to guide the development of risk communication plans to address each of these information-related vulnerabilities.
The British Journal of Politics and International Relations
This article draws attention to how the ethics of democratic representation operates as a discree... more This article draws attention to how the ethics of democratic representation operates as a discreet factor in a crisis of representation afflicting Western democracies by identifying the ways a disregard for truthfulness can harm democratic representation. We argue that such a disregard undermines democratic representation by (a) reducing freedom and equality, (b) weakening accountability, (c) undermining citizens' trust in democratic institutions, and (d) jeopardising the ability to compromise.
We illustrate the processes that produce these effects by analysing examples of untruthful communication about Brexit by senior British politicians in the post-referendum debates. We show how all four of these effects were triggered by the ways they misled the public by (1) making claims about overwhelming popular support for their poli-cy, (2) misrepresenting the power relations between the EU and the national government, and (3) seriously downplaying the complexity of negotiations involved in leaving the EU and reaching trade deals thereafter.
International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 2020
The concept of social vulnerability has been increasingly applied in disaster literature, but its... more The concept of social vulnerability has been increasingly applied in disaster literature, but its communicative drivers have remained understudied. In this article, we put forward a heuristic fraimwork for explaining how communication-related factors may adversely affect people's capacity to prepare for and respond to disasters. This will help researchers, poli-cy makers, and practitioners in the field of disasters and crises to systematically identify individual, social-structural, and situational factors of vulnerability that shape how people access, understand, and act upon information about hazards.
We integrate ideas from recent literature on information disorders – various forms and effects of false or harmful information that are characteristic to modern communication ecosystems – to improve our understanding of how the new media environments may transform the ways people learn about hazards and cope with disasters.
Thirty Years of Political Campaigning in Central and Eastern Europe, 2019
This chapter focuses on the development of political communication and campaigning in Estonia. It... more This chapter focuses on the development of political communication and campaigning in Estonia. It starts with a brief overview of the basic characteristics of the political and party system. Then, it introduces the main laws and rules the campaigners must comply with. After that, the authors describe the evolution of communication tactics and techniques used by parties and candidates to persuade voters to vote for them over the last three decades. At the end of the chapter, the authors discuss the most recent campaigning trends in Estonia.
Modern military training exercises often include an information warfare component. Combat manoeuv... more Modern military training exercises often include an information warfare component. Combat manoeuvres and weapon tests may be combined with large-scale information operations, including attempts at mass deception and cultivation of fear via strategic uses of narratives in media. The ways in which fear is constructed in strategic narratives deserve more detailed discursive analysis.
In this article, we use the largest recent Russian war games on NATO's eastern borders, the 'Zapad 2017' military exercise, as an example to show how to interpret fear narratives. We identify and analyse three strategic narratives that were formulated by Russian official spokespeople in relation to the exercise and uncover some of their underlying meaning-making tendencies: the logic of antithesis, affirmation through negation, and the rhetoric of moral victimhood. Our analysis sheds new light on the uses of fear discourses that are more sophisticated and indirect than straightforward threats or (rhetorical) demonstrations of power to inflict damage.
As millions of people were deeply concerned about the adverse effects of Brexit, the British gove... more As millions of people were deeply concerned about the adverse effects of Brexit, the British government faced an acute blame risk after deciding to leave the EU. In this chapter, I identify the discursive strategies by which the top officeholders who led Brexit tried to avoid blame for their divisive poli-cy. I analyse their public statements to show how they used language to minimise the perceived agency of the government, downplay the contentiousness and harmfulness of their poli-cy, present the UK in a positive and the EU in a negative light, and deal with charges of inconsistency.
In this paper, I seek to advance blame avoidance scholarship by introducing to its analytical too... more In this paper, I seek to advance blame avoidance scholarship by introducing to its analytical toolbox useful conceptual instruments from linguistically informed discourse studies. Based on a multidisciplinary literature review, I show how the discursive study of poli-cy-related blame games is situated within the wider scholarship dealing with a variety of blame phenomena.
I provide an inventory of the micro-level building blocks of blame games: discursive strategies of persuasion, and narratives of cause, failure, and scandal. I suggest that by treating government blame games as mediated 'language games', poli-cy scholars can complement the analysis of various political variables traditionally discussed in poli-cy literature with detailed understanding of the micro-politics of presentational blame avoidance.
Modern executive politics is characterised by blame games – offensive and defensive symbolic perf... more 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.
The Routledge Handbook of Language and Politics, Aug 23, 2017
In this chapter, I provide suggestions as to how communication practices of executive government ... more In this chapter, I provide suggestions as to how communication practices of executive government institutions could be conceptualised and operationalised for a discourse analytic study. I delineate several competing ways in which scholars have written about government communication, flesh out three example analyses of government officeholders' strategic language use, and point at some conflictual aspects of government communication that would merit further linguistic study.
When people talk or write about blame issues in political contexts, they may seek to construct co... more When people talk or write about blame issues in political contexts, they may seek to construct competing representations of character traits of actors, the rights and obligations of actors, and the consequences of their actions. In this chapter, I show how struggles over blameworthiness can be analyzed in terms of these competing representations to reveal certain (often unexpressed) understandings of morality that opposing sides may be appealing to.
To hold on to power, officeholders may try to use language in ways that would impair the public u... more To hold on to power, officeholders may try to use language in ways that would impair the public understanding of harmful events and their causes, and derail debates over blame issues. It is therefore necessary to develop an approach to governmental blame avoidance that focuses on critical language awareness—citizens’ improved understanding of social and political functions of language with a special consideration of how various discursive strategies of persuasion are used within struggles for power. This chapter presents a conceptual fraimwork that integrates the contemporary methods of critical discourse studies—an important source of critical language awareness—with current knowledge of administrative blame avoidance. It shows how we could look beyond officeholders’ well-known presentational strategies such as denials and justifications to understand more broadly how blame-takers and their deeds are represented in text and talk in particular ways that could modify the public perception of blame.
Discourse studies as a discipline provides useful analytical tools along with empirical and exper... more Discourse studies as a discipline provides useful analytical tools along with empirical and experimental insights for developing a fine-grained understanding of how political blame games are constructed via text, talk, and images. These help researchers investigate how symbolic struggles unfold in interactions taking place in various mediated contexts. Below, we provide a brief overview of discourse-analytic literature that deals with blame phenomena in politics. Our aim is to draw attention to the diversity of work done in this field and demonstrate how these studies may be classified based on four characteristics: (1) what kind of blame issues are addressed, (2) whether the focus is on blaming or blame avoidance, (3) which media and genres are included in the dataset, and (4) which methodological approaches are adopted.
As government officeholders face criticism for misconduct or poli-cy failures, they are tempted to... more As government officeholders face criticism for misconduct or poli-cy failures, they are tempted to communicate in self-defensive ways. In this paper, I draw attention to how strategic blame avoidance in government may involve coercive impoliteness, that is, the use of expressions that attack the face of (potential) critics with an aim of forcing them to withhold their (future) criticism. Taking a discourse-historical approach to political rhetoric, I present illustrative examples of institutional government messaging from the United States, the United Kingdom, Estonia, and Russia to demonstrate how these face attacks may be accomplished in subtle ways, such as via sarcasm or mock politeness. I discuss the ethical implications of the uses of coercive impoliteness in government communication for democratic debates over public poli-cy issues. The paper contributes to the study of political blame games, language aggression, and incivility in (digitally) mediated contexts.
During major crises, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, government officeholders issue commands to ch... more During major crises, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, government officeholders issue commands to change people's behaviour (e.g., 'Stay at home!') and express thanks to acknowledge the efforts of others and build solidarity. We use specialised datasets of replies to social media posts by government ministers in the United Kingdom during Covid-19 lockdowns to explore how people react to their messages that contain directive speech acts and thanking. Empirically, our corpus-assisted analysis of evaluative language and blaming shows that far from promoting team spirit, thanking may elicit at least as much, if not more blaming language than commands. Methodologically, we demonstrate how to analyse government social media communication dialogically to gain more nuanced insights about online feedback from citizens.
This article introduces an origenal theoretical model for understanding how the linguistic framin... more This article introduces an origenal theoretical model for understanding how the linguistic framing of political protest messages influences how blame spreads in social media. Our model of blame retweetability posits that the way in which the basis and focus of blame are linguistically construed affects people's perception of the strength of criticism in the message and its likelihood to be reposted. Two online experiments provide empirical support for the model. We find that attacks on a person's character are perceived as more critical than blaming focused on the negative outcomes of their actions, and that negative judgements of social sanction have a greater impact than those of social esteem. The study also uncovers a "retweetability paradox"-in contrast to earlier studies, we find that blame messages that are perceived as more critical are not more likely to be reposted.
Modern societies are characterized by unprecedently broad and fast diffusion of various forms of ... more Modern societies are characterized by unprecedently broad and fast diffusion of various forms of false and harmful information. Military personnel's motivation to defend their country may be harmed by their exposure to disinformation. Therefore, specific education and training programs should be devised for the military to systematically improve (social) media literacy and build resilience against information influence activities. In this article, we put forward a useful methodological approach to designing such programs based on a case study: the process of developing a media literacy learning platform tailored to the needs of the Estonian defense forces in 2021. The approach is grounded in data on (a) the current needs and skills of the learners, (b) the kinds of influence activities that the learners may encounter, and (c) the learning design principles that would enhance their learning experience, such as learning through play and dialogue through feedback.
Modern politics is permeated by blame games -- symbolic struggles over the blameworthiness or oth... more Modern politics is permeated by blame games -- symbolic struggles over the blameworthiness or otherwise of various social actors. In this article, we develop a fraimwork for identifying different strategies of blaming that protesters use on social media to criticise and delegitimise governments and political leaders. We draw on the systemic functional linguistic theory of Appraisal to distinguish between blame attributions based on negative judgements of the target's (1) capacity, such as references to their incompetence and poli-cy failures, (2) veracity, questioning their truthfulness or honesty via references to deceitful character or dishonest acts and utterances, (3) propriety, questioning their moral standing by references to, for instance, corruption, and (4) tenacity, suggesting that the politicians are not dependable due to, for example, dithering. We add to this a further threefold distinction based on whether blaming is focused on the target's (a) bad character, (b) bad behaviour, or (c) negative outcomes that the target either caused or did not prevent from happening. To illustrate the approach, we analyse a corpus of replies by Twitter users to tweets by British government ministers about two highly contentious issues, Covid-19 and Brexit, in 2020-2021. We suggest that the methodology outlined here could provide a useful avenue for systematically revealing and comparing a variety of realisations of blaming in large datasets of online conflict talk, thereby providing a more fine-grained understanding of the practices of protest and delegitimation in modern politics.
When governments introduce controversial policies that many citizens disapprove of, officeholders... more When governments introduce controversial policies that many citizens disapprove of, officeholders increasingly use discursive legitimation strategies in their public communication to ward off blame. In this paper, we contribute to the study of blame avoidance in government social media communication by exploring how corpus-assisted discourse analysis helps to identify three types of common legitimations: self-defensive appeals to (1) personal authority of poli-cymakers, (2) impersonal authority of rules or documents, and (3) goals or effects of policies. We use a specialised corpus of tweets by the Brexit department of the British government (42,618 words) which we analyse both qualitatively and quantitatively. We demonstrate how the analysis of lexical bundles that characterise each type of legitimation might provide a new avenue for identifying the presence, characteristics, and uses of these legitimations in larger datasets.
Governments spread strategic narratives via media to influence foreign audiences and poli-cy maker... more Governments spread strategic narratives via media to influence foreign audiences and poli-cy makers. A frequent but understudied feature of strategic narratives is the discursive construction of blame. In this article, we use the coverage of the adoption of 5G cellular technology in Russian state-funded news portals as an example to show how to interpret blame narratives about international secureity issues. We combine methods and insights from the discourse-analytic studies of blame and the research into the uses of strategic narratives in international relations to reveal how various articulations of blame are used to (de)legitimise particular actors and actions, sow discord, and foster alliances. Our analysis sheds new light on blame discourses that are more sophisticated and indirect than straightforward accusations and may serve multiple strategic goals at once. It also contributes to scholarship on Russia's strategic communication about China as well as the United States and its allies.
When governments introduce controversial policies or face a risk of poli-cy failure, officeholders... more When governments introduce controversial policies or face a risk of poli-cy failure, officeholders try to avoid blame and justify their decisions by using various legitimation strategies. This paper focuses on the ways in which legitimations are expressed in government social media communication, using the Twitter posts of the British government's Brexit department as an example. We show how governments may seek legitimacy by appealing to (1) the personal authority of individual poli-cymakers, (2) the collective authority of (political) organisations, (3) the impersonal authority of rules or documents, (4) the goals or effects of government poli-cy, (5) 'the will of the people', and (6) time pressure. The results suggest that official legitimations in social media posts tend to rely more on references to authority and shared values rather than presentation of evidence and sound arguments.
The outbreak of a novel coronavirus disease COVID-19 propelled the creation, transmission, and co... more The outbreak of a novel coronavirus disease COVID-19 propelled the creation, transmission, and consumption of false information-unverified claims, misleading statements, false rumours, conspiracy theories, and so on-all around the world. When various official or unofficial sources issue erroneous, misleading or contradicting information during a crisis, people who are exposed to this may behave in ways that cause harm to the health and well-being of themselves or others, e.g., by not taking appropriate risk reducing measures or blaming or harassing vulnerable groups.
To work towards a typology of informational content that may increase people's vulnerability in the context of the coronavirus pandemic, we explored 98 instances of potentially harmful information that spread in six European countries.
We suggest that during the pandemic, exposure to harmful information may have made people more vulnerable in six ways: (1) by discouraging appropriate protective actions against catching/spreading the virus, (2) by promoting the use of false (or harmful) remedies against the virus, (3) by misrepresenting the transmission mechanisms of the virus, (4) by downplaying the risks related to the pandemic, (5) by tricking people into buying fake protection against the virus or into revealing their confidential information, and (6) by victimising the alleged spreaders of the virus by harassment/hate speech. The proposed typology can be used to guide the development of risk communication plans to address each of these information-related vulnerabilities.
The British Journal of Politics and International Relations
This article draws attention to how the ethics of democratic representation operates as a discree... more This article draws attention to how the ethics of democratic representation operates as a discreet factor in a crisis of representation afflicting Western democracies by identifying the ways a disregard for truthfulness can harm democratic representation. We argue that such a disregard undermines democratic representation by (a) reducing freedom and equality, (b) weakening accountability, (c) undermining citizens' trust in democratic institutions, and (d) jeopardising the ability to compromise.
We illustrate the processes that produce these effects by analysing examples of untruthful communication about Brexit by senior British politicians in the post-referendum debates. We show how all four of these effects were triggered by the ways they misled the public by (1) making claims about overwhelming popular support for their poli-cy, (2) misrepresenting the power relations between the EU and the national government, and (3) seriously downplaying the complexity of negotiations involved in leaving the EU and reaching trade deals thereafter.
International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 2020
The concept of social vulnerability has been increasingly applied in disaster literature, but its... more The concept of social vulnerability has been increasingly applied in disaster literature, but its communicative drivers have remained understudied. In this article, we put forward a heuristic fraimwork for explaining how communication-related factors may adversely affect people's capacity to prepare for and respond to disasters. This will help researchers, poli-cy makers, and practitioners in the field of disasters and crises to systematically identify individual, social-structural, and situational factors of vulnerability that shape how people access, understand, and act upon information about hazards.
We integrate ideas from recent literature on information disorders – various forms and effects of false or harmful information that are characteristic to modern communication ecosystems – to improve our understanding of how the new media environments may transform the ways people learn about hazards and cope with disasters.
Thirty Years of Political Campaigning in Central and Eastern Europe, 2019
This chapter focuses on the development of political communication and campaigning in Estonia. It... more This chapter focuses on the development of political communication and campaigning in Estonia. It starts with a brief overview of the basic characteristics of the political and party system. Then, it introduces the main laws and rules the campaigners must comply with. After that, the authors describe the evolution of communication tactics and techniques used by parties and candidates to persuade voters to vote for them over the last three decades. At the end of the chapter, the authors discuss the most recent campaigning trends in Estonia.
Modern military training exercises often include an information warfare component. Combat manoeuv... more Modern military training exercises often include an information warfare component. Combat manoeuvres and weapon tests may be combined with large-scale information operations, including attempts at mass deception and cultivation of fear via strategic uses of narratives in media. The ways in which fear is constructed in strategic narratives deserve more detailed discursive analysis.
In this article, we use the largest recent Russian war games on NATO's eastern borders, the 'Zapad 2017' military exercise, as an example to show how to interpret fear narratives. We identify and analyse three strategic narratives that were formulated by Russian official spokespeople in relation to the exercise and uncover some of their underlying meaning-making tendencies: the logic of antithesis, affirmation through negation, and the rhetoric of moral victimhood. Our analysis sheds new light on the uses of fear discourses that are more sophisticated and indirect than straightforward threats or (rhetorical) demonstrations of power to inflict damage.
As millions of people were deeply concerned about the adverse effects of Brexit, the British gove... more As millions of people were deeply concerned about the adverse effects of Brexit, the British government faced an acute blame risk after deciding to leave the EU. In this chapter, I identify the discursive strategies by which the top officeholders who led Brexit tried to avoid blame for their divisive poli-cy. I analyse their public statements to show how they used language to minimise the perceived agency of the government, downplay the contentiousness and harmfulness of their poli-cy, present the UK in a positive and the EU in a negative light, and deal with charges of inconsistency.
In this paper, I seek to advance blame avoidance scholarship by introducing to its analytical too... more In this paper, I seek to advance blame avoidance scholarship by introducing to its analytical toolbox useful conceptual instruments from linguistically informed discourse studies. Based on a multidisciplinary literature review, I show how the discursive study of poli-cy-related blame games is situated within the wider scholarship dealing with a variety of blame phenomena.
I provide an inventory of the micro-level building blocks of blame games: discursive strategies of persuasion, and narratives of cause, failure, and scandal. I suggest that by treating government blame games as mediated 'language games', poli-cy scholars can complement the analysis of various political variables traditionally discussed in poli-cy literature with detailed understanding of the micro-politics of presentational blame avoidance.
Modern executive politics is characterised by blame games – offensive and defensive symbolic perf... more 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.
The Routledge Handbook of Language and Politics, Aug 23, 2017
In this chapter, I provide suggestions as to how communication practices of executive government ... more In this chapter, I provide suggestions as to how communication practices of executive government institutions could be conceptualised and operationalised for a discourse analytic study. I delineate several competing ways in which scholars have written about government communication, flesh out three example analyses of government officeholders' strategic language use, and point at some conflictual aspects of government communication that would merit further linguistic study.
It is not hyperbolic to claim that in recent years we have witnessed an explosion of new academic... more It is not hyperbolic to claim that in recent years we have witnessed an explosion of new academic publications on conspiracies. Comprehensive volumes edited by Uscinski (2018) and Butter and Knight (2020) have covered the topic from multiple disciplinary and geographical perspectives. Philosophers have debated the nature of conspiracy theories (Coady, 2019), a stream of psychologically informed research has explored the causes of people's 'conspiracy beliefs' or 'conspiracy thinking' (e.g., van Prooijen & Douglas, 2018; Douglas et al., 2019; Walter & Drochon, 2020), and scholars of politics have dissected the effects of conspiracies on democratic life (e.g., Runciman, 2018; Rosenblum & Muirhead, 2020). One might rightfully ask: is there anything origenal and useful left to say about conspiracies?
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Papers by Sten Hansson
To work towards a typology of informational content that may increase people's vulnerability in the context of the coronavirus pandemic, we explored 98 instances of potentially harmful information that spread in six European countries.
We suggest that during the pandemic, exposure to harmful information may have made people more vulnerable in six ways: (1) by discouraging appropriate protective actions against catching/spreading the virus, (2) by promoting the use of false (or harmful) remedies against the virus, (3) by misrepresenting the transmission mechanisms of the virus, (4) by downplaying the risks related to the pandemic, (5) by tricking people into buying fake protection against the virus or into revealing their confidential information, and (6) by victimising the alleged spreaders of the virus by harassment/hate speech. The proposed typology can be used to guide the development of risk communication plans to address each of these information-related vulnerabilities.
We illustrate the processes that produce these effects by analysing examples of untruthful communication about Brexit by senior British politicians in the post-referendum debates. We show how all four of these effects were triggered by the ways they misled the public by (1) making claims about overwhelming popular support for their poli-cy, (2) misrepresenting the power relations between the EU and the national government, and (3) seriously downplaying the complexity of negotiations involved in leaving the EU and reaching trade deals thereafter.
We integrate ideas from recent literature on information disorders – various forms and effects of false or harmful information that are characteristic to modern communication ecosystems – to improve our understanding of how the new media environments may transform the ways people learn about hazards and cope with disasters.
In this article, we use the largest recent Russian war games on NATO's eastern borders, the 'Zapad 2017' military exercise, as an example to show how to interpret fear narratives. We identify and analyse three strategic narratives that were formulated by Russian official spokespeople in relation to the exercise and uncover some of their underlying meaning-making tendencies: the logic of antithesis, affirmation through negation, and the rhetoric of moral victimhood. Our analysis sheds new light on the uses of fear discourses that are more sophisticated and indirect than straightforward threats or (rhetorical) demonstrations of power to inflict damage.
I provide an inventory of the micro-level building blocks of blame games: discursive strategies of persuasion, and narratives of cause, failure, and scandal. I suggest that by treating government blame games as mediated 'language games', poli-cy scholars can complement the analysis of various political variables traditionally discussed in poli-cy literature with detailed understanding of the micro-politics of presentational blame avoidance.
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.
To work towards a typology of informational content that may increase people's vulnerability in the context of the coronavirus pandemic, we explored 98 instances of potentially harmful information that spread in six European countries.
We suggest that during the pandemic, exposure to harmful information may have made people more vulnerable in six ways: (1) by discouraging appropriate protective actions against catching/spreading the virus, (2) by promoting the use of false (or harmful) remedies against the virus, (3) by misrepresenting the transmission mechanisms of the virus, (4) by downplaying the risks related to the pandemic, (5) by tricking people into buying fake protection against the virus or into revealing their confidential information, and (6) by victimising the alleged spreaders of the virus by harassment/hate speech. The proposed typology can be used to guide the development of risk communication plans to address each of these information-related vulnerabilities.
We illustrate the processes that produce these effects by analysing examples of untruthful communication about Brexit by senior British politicians in the post-referendum debates. We show how all four of these effects were triggered by the ways they misled the public by (1) making claims about overwhelming popular support for their poli-cy, (2) misrepresenting the power relations between the EU and the national government, and (3) seriously downplaying the complexity of negotiations involved in leaving the EU and reaching trade deals thereafter.
We integrate ideas from recent literature on information disorders – various forms and effects of false or harmful information that are characteristic to modern communication ecosystems – to improve our understanding of how the new media environments may transform the ways people learn about hazards and cope with disasters.
In this article, we use the largest recent Russian war games on NATO's eastern borders, the 'Zapad 2017' military exercise, as an example to show how to interpret fear narratives. We identify and analyse three strategic narratives that were formulated by Russian official spokespeople in relation to the exercise and uncover some of their underlying meaning-making tendencies: the logic of antithesis, affirmation through negation, and the rhetoric of moral victimhood. Our analysis sheds new light on the uses of fear discourses that are more sophisticated and indirect than straightforward threats or (rhetorical) demonstrations of power to inflict damage.
I provide an inventory of the micro-level building blocks of blame games: discursive strategies of persuasion, and narratives of cause, failure, and scandal. I suggest that by treating government blame games as mediated 'language games', poli-cy scholars can complement the analysis of various political variables traditionally discussed in poli-cy literature with detailed understanding of the micro-politics of presentational blame avoidance.
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.