What is Political Discourse Analysis?

Taun A. van Dijk.

Introduction

PDA is both about political discourse, and it is also a critical enterprise. Critical-political discourse analysis
deals especially with the reproduction of political power, power abuse or domination through political
discourse, including the various forms of resistance or counter-power against such forms of discursive
dominance. In particular such an analysis deals with the discursive conditions and consequences of social
and political inequality that results from such domination.

Defining political discourse

 Actors involved in politics

Political discourse is identified by its actors or authors, viz., politicians. Indeed, the vast bulk of studies of
political discourse is about the text and talk of professional politicians or political institutions, such as
presidents and prime ministers and other members of government, parliament or political parties, both at
the local, national and international levels.

Politicians in this sense are the group of people who are being paid for their (political) activities, and who
are being elected or appointed (or self-designated) as the central players in the polity.

However, politicians are not the only participants in the domain of politics. From the interactional point of
view of discourse analysis, we therefore should also include the various recipients in political
communicative events, such as the public, the people, citizens, the `masses', and other groups or
categories. That is, once we locate politics and its discourses in the public sphere, many more participants
in political communication appear on the stage.

Hence, the delimitation of political discourse by its principal authors' is insufficient and needs to be
extended to a more complex picture of all its relevant participants, whether or not these are actively
involved in political discourse, or merely as recipients in one-way modes of communication.

All these groups and individuals, as well as their organizations and institutions, may take part in the political
process, and many of them are actively involved in political discourse.

 Activities and practices of the political actors.

Another, but overlapping way of delimiting the object of study is by focusing on the nature of the activities or
practices being accomplished by political text and talk rather than only on the nature of its participants.

People are participants of political discourse only when acting as political actors, and hence as participating
in political actions, such as governing, ruling, legislating, protesting, dissenting, or voting. Specifically
interesting for PDA is then that many of these political actions or practices are at the same time discursive
practices. In other words, forms of text and talk in such cases have political functions and implications.

 The importance of the context in the definition of a discourse as ‘political’.

Political and communicative events and encounters have their own settings (time, place, and
circumstances), occasions, intentions, functions, goals, and legal or political implications. Politicians talk
politically also (or only) if they and their talk are contextualized in such communicative events such as
cabinet meetings, parliamentary sessions, election campaigns, rallies, interviews with the media,
bureaucratic practices, protest demonstrations, and so on. Again, text and context mutually define each
other, in the sense that a session of parliament is precisely such only when elected politicians are debating
(talking , arguing, etc.) in parliament buildings ín an official capacity (as MPs), and during the official
(officially opened) session of parliament.

This integration of political texts and contexts in political encounters may of course finally be characterized
in more abstract tercos as accomplishing specific political aims and goals, such as making or influencing
political decisions, that is decisions that pertain to joint action, the distribution of social resources, the
establishment or change of official norms, regulations and laws, and so on.
 The domain of politics

We see that ultimately the definition of political discourse can hardly escape the definition of the very notion
of `politics' itself. Politics may thus not only include all official or unofficial political actors, events,
encounters, settings, actions and discourses, but also include political processes, political systems (like
democracy and communism), political ideologies (like liberalism), and political (group) relations (such as
power, inequality, hegemony, and oppression). In all these cases, the polity not only involves political
actors, events, relations, practices or properties, but also social, economic and cultural ones.

 Societal domain: Education, Health, Law, Business, the Arts, etc., play an important role in the
commonsense definition of political actions and discourse. It may also be negatively used in judging
illegitimate practices in other domains.

 Political systems: These systems are among the most obvious commonsense categories of the
domain of politics: Communism, dictatorship, democracy, fascism, or the social democracy, among
others, are generally seen as typically 'political', e.g., in the description of countries, nation-states,
political parties, politicians or political acts. These systems are usually understood as referring to the
organization and distribution of power and the principles of decision making.

 Political values: Shared cultural values may be declared typical for political systems. Thus, Freedom is
not only a political relationship, but also a basic political value organizing more specific political
ideologies and attitudes. The same is true for the values of Solidarity, Equality and Tolerance, among
others.

 Political ideologies: They are the basic belief systems that underlie and organize the shared social
representations of groups and their members. In that respect, communism or democracy may be seen
both as a system and as a complex set of basic social representations, involving relevant values and
sustaining specific altitudes about properties (like power, equality, etc.) that characterize the system.

 Political institutions: The domain of politics is typically analyzed as consisting of a number of political
institutions, which, top down, organize the political field, actors and actions, such as the State,
Governments, Parliament or Congress (the Legislature), etc.

 Political organizations: Less (legally, constitutionally) official are the large number of political
organizations that structure political action, such as political parties, political clubs, NGOs, and so on.

 Political groups: Independently of their organization in political organizations, collections of political

actors may form more or less formal, cohesive or permanent groups, such as opponents, dissidents,
demonstrators, coalitions, crowds, and in general socio-political movements.

 Political actors: Besides paid, elected representatives (`politicians') the class of political actors is
commonsensically defined by all those who are `engaged in politics', by accomplishing political action,
including demonstrators, lobbyists and strikers.

 Political relations: The various structural units identified above are connected by multiple relations,
some of which are typical for the field of politics: Power, power abuse, hegemony, oppression,
tolerance, equality and inequality, among many others, especially define how the State relates to its
citizens, or how certain political groups are positioned relative to others.

 Political process: the political process is the overall term that categorizes complex, long-term,
sequences of political actions. Governing, legislation, opposition, solidarity, agenda-setting, and policies
are among the prototypical aspects of such political processes.

 Political actions: concrete acts and interactions which are typical for the political domain, such as
sessions and meetings of political institutions, organizations and groups, passing laws, voting,
demonstrations, campaigning, revolutions, and so on. Such actions are also defined in terms of their
intentions, purposes, goals and functions within the more complex political process.

 Political discourse: a specific example of political action and interaction are political discourses (and
its many genres) which are a prominent way of `doing politics'. Indeed, most political actions (such as
 passing laws, decision making, meeting, campaigning, etc.) are largely discursive. Thus, besides
parliamentary debates, bills, laws, government or ministerial regulations, and other institutional forms of
text and talk, we find such political discourse genres as propaganda, political advertising, political
speeches, media interviews, political talk shows on TV, party programs, ballots, and so on.

 Political cognition: shared social knowledge and political altitudes, as well as more specific knowledge
(models) of concrete political events. The most pervasive common-sense notion of this category is
probably that of `public opinion'.

Political discourse as political action

Both in politics and in political science, political discourse is primarily seen as a form of political action, and
as pan of the political process. Such a view is perfectly compatible with the dominant paradigm in most
social approaches to discourse, that discourse is a form of social action and interaction.
It is obvious that also written texts, or rather writing texts, are a form of social and political action. Textual
(written, printed, computer) communication may not be face-to-face, but therefore no less a form of action
and interaction.
Accomplishing political action, or simply `doing politics' by text and talk is obviously more than producing or
perceiving discourse in political contexts and by political actors. Political talk and text, is such only
when constitutive part of the political process of e.g. governing, legislating, election campaigns, party
propaganda, and so on. Hence, discourse in parliament is only political when it is overtly pan of, and
functional within the parliamentary debate, if it is `for the record', and if parliamentarians intend and are
heard to contribute to the parliamentary business at hand, such as debating a Bill. We see that for this case
of institutional talk, several rather precise conditions must be satisfied.
In view of our analysis, however, we continue to specify that as soon as a discourse or part of a discourse
is directly or indirectly functional in the political process (e.g., of campaigning, canvassing or otherwise of
influencing or being influenced in view of elections), such discourse should be categorized and analyzed as
being (also, mainly) political.
Since practically all text and talk indirectly has socio-political conditions and consequences, we therefore
again require a more or less arbitrary set of criteria according to which discourse may be categorized as
(mainly) political, viz., when it has a direct functional role as a form of political action in the political process.

Discourse structures
Some textual conditions of political discourse are, for instance, speaking audibly, directing oneself to an
audience, and respecting a topical (semantic) organization that is compatible with the issue on the
(political) agenda at hand.
Besides this normativity of official discourse, discourse structures may also satisfy criterion of effectiveness
and persuasion. Thus, lexical items not only may be selected because of official criteria of decorum, but
also because they effectively emphasize or de-emphasize political attitudes and opinions, garner support,
manipulate public opinion, manufacture political consent, or legitimate political power. The same may be
true for the selection of topics, for the use of rhetoric figures, the pragmatic management of speech
acts, interactional self-presentation, and so on. In other words, maybe the structures of political
discourse are seldom exclusive, but typical and effective discourse in political contexts may well have
preferred structures and strategies that are functional in the adequate accomplishment of political actions in
political contexts.

 TOPICS
In principle political discourse may be about virtually any topic. However, we may assume that political
discourse also exhibits preferred topics.
-Political discourse will be primarily about politics. we may typically expect overall meanings related to
political systems, ideologies, institutions, the political process, political actors, and political events. In other
words, much political discourse is reflexive.
-Political discourse usually combines its topics with those from other societal domains. Thus a
debate about immigration policies is not only about government policies, but also about immigration or
minorities, and the same is true for political meetings, discussions, debates, speeches or propaganda about
education, health care, drugs, crime, the economy, (un)employment, or foreign affairs. This seems to open
up a Pandora-box of possible topics and to suggest that formulating topical constraints in political discourse
seems pointless.
-Topical participants. Topical participants are all those actors who are able to contribute to the political
process, viz., elite groups and organizations on the one hand, and the `public' (citizens, the people, etc.) on
the other hand. More generally, then, topical participants are public actors.
-Political events and actions. Given the prominent role of political actors, we may here expect political
events and especially actions: What politicians have done or will do, what they will decide or which opinions
they have about political issues. Again, such actions, decisions or opinions have a general, official,
institutional or public nature, and generally pertain to the realm of public management, policy making,
decision making, regulating, controlling or their political counterparts: protesting, demonstrating, opposing,
challenging, and so on.
-Political discourse tends to be future-oriented. Given the role of discourse in the political process, we
may typically expect references to or threats about future developments, announcements or promises
about future actions and so on. Quite typical for much political discourse is the fact that references to the
present tend to be negative, and those to the future positive. References to the past are ambiguous.
Typically conservatives may refer to the good old times', but so may progressive environmentalists referring
to `unspoiled ' nature, or even socialists when referring to the solidarity, class struggle and the blessings of
the welfare state now being destroyed.
-Polarization of political discourse. Descriptions and references to politicians, public figures, and
organizations and their actions are of course a function of politically and ideologically based opinions and
altitudes. Such evaluations are characteristically polarized: Whereas WE are democratic, THEY are not,
and whereas Our soldiers, or those who share our cause, are freedom fighters, those of the Others are
obviously terrorists. This semantic polarization of the evaluative dimension of semantic macro propositions
is functional and effective in the political process, e.g., in the competition for votes, support, and the
struggle for political survival and legitimation. Moreover, given the nature of political polarization in the
political process, we may further expect the typical positive evaluation of us and OUR actions in positive
terms and of THEM and THEIR actions in negative terms.

 SUPERSTRUCTURES OR TEXTUAL ‘SCHEMATA’

The first general property of such schematic structures is that they may make (global) meanings more or
less prominent for obvious partisan reasons. Whether or not some information is highlighted in a headline,
a summary or a conclusion depends on the way meanings are distributed in discourse.
Secondly, each political discourse genre may exhibit its own canonical schematic structure, as is the case
for parliamentary debates, political speeches, party programs, propaganda leaflets or slogan in
demonstrations. Some of these categories are obligatory whereas others are merely conventional or
strategic, as in political speeches or propaganda.
Perhaps most pervasive in political text and talk are the structures and strategies of argumentation, in
which both explicit and implicit premises, the various steps of the argumentation, as well as the conclusions
may all organize a political dispute, in which opposed standpoints of the political Others are systematically
attacked and those of the political ingroup defended.

 LOCAL SEMANTICS
While more subtle and indirect, there are properties of local semantics that need further analysis, such as
conditions of local coherence, presuppositions and entailment, indirectness and implicitness, strategies of
description and representation, and so on. Lacking systematic empirical data on these properties of political
discourse, we are unable to predict which of these tend to be prototypical in political discourse.
-POLARIZATION. Given the nature of the political system and process, thus, we may first of all expect the
usual partisan polarization, also at this level of analysis. Our group (party, ideology, etc.) will tend to be
described in more positive terms than their group (party, ideology, etc.), a polarization that in general will
result in contrastive meanings. One other main semantic strategy to do this is to make propositions with
positive predicates about our own group rather explicit than implicit, rather direct than indirect, and stated
rather than presupposed.
-GENERALIZATION AND SPECIFICATION. Functional relations of Generalization and Specification, of
Contrast and Example, also allow the expression of biased mental models of political events and states of
affairs. Thus, if the political ingroup (WE) have done something bad, we may expect this to be treated as an
exception and as an incident, so that such descriptions (already minimalized in the type and number of
propositions) will hardly be followed by Generalizations. The reverse will be true for the description of
negative actions of the political outgroup (mal). As we also know from over-generalizations in prejudice,
their bad acts tend to be seen as typical and hence will be described in detail and then also be generalized.
Or conversely, a general statement will be made about them, which will then be backed up' with detailed
Specifications (details) or Examples (stories).
In Sum, we see that the discursive strategies of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation
may affect the local semantics of text and talk in various ways. We may conclude from these theoretical
reflections on the local semantics of political discourse that politicians will tend to emphasize all meanings
that are positive about themselves and their own group (nation, party, ideology, etc.) and negative about
the Others, while they will hide, mitigate, play-down, leave implicit, etc. information that will give them a bad
impression and their opponents a good impression. Discourse semantics has a wide variety of means to
accomplish such complementary strategies at the local level.

 LEXICON
What is true for global and local meanings is obviously true for the meanings of words, and hence at the
level of lexical choice and variation. Indeed, most studies of 'political language' focus on the special words
being used in politics.
Opponents or enemies will be described in more negative terms, as the classical pair of terrorists vs.
freedom fighters. Conversely, our bad habits, properties, products or actions will usually tend to be
described (if at all) by euphemisms, as when our bombs are called 'Peacemaker' and our killings of civilians
among the Others as `collateral damage'.

 SYNTAX
Somewhat less obvious and more subtle than lexical style is the political manipulation of syntactic style,
such as the use of pronouns, variations of word order, the use of specific syntactic categories, active and
passive constructions, nominalizations, clause embedding, sentence complexity and other ways to express
underlying meanings in sentence structures.
-One of the more obvious is the use of deictic pronouns, as is already clear from the paradigmatic pair
denoting political polarization: us vs. THEM. Thus, the use of the political plural we (or possessive our) has
many implications for the political position, alliances, solidarity, and other socio-political position of the
speaker, depending on the relevant ingroup being constructed in the present context
-Other syntactic variation, such as word order, usually has two types of political functions, that of emphasis
or mitigation through more or less prominent placement of words and phrases, and the ways underlying
semantic roles are focused on. Syntactic topicalization by fronting a word may draw special attention to
such a word and — following the ideological square such may be the case again in order to emphasize our
good things and their bad ones.
-Active vs passive sentences. Active sentences will associate responsible agency with (topical) syntactic
subjects, whereas passive sentences will focus on objects (e.g. victims) of such actions and defocus
responsible agency by putting agents last in prepositional phrases, or leaving it implicit, as in the well-
known headlines, such us “Police killed demonstrators vs. Demonstrators killed by Police vs.
Demonstrators killed”.

Thus, as is true for semantic structures, syntactic structures are able to put more or less emphasis, focus or
prominence on specific words, phrases or clauses, and thus indirectly contribute to corresponding semantic
stress on specific meanings, as a function of the political interests and allegiances of the speaker or writer.

 RHETHORIC
Rhetoric was primarily developed as an ‘art’ to persuade people in a political assembly. One theoretical
difference however is that unlike semantic, syntactic and stylistic structures, these rhetorical operations are
generally optional. This meanS that their presence usually has persuasive functions, and therefore political
significance in a political context of communication.
-Thus, we may expect repetition operations at the level of sounds (alliterations and rhymes), sentence
forms (parallelisms) and meaning (semantic repetition), as one of the major strategies to draw attention
to preferred meanings and to enhance construction of such meanings in mental models and their
memorization in ongoing persuasion attempts or later recall.
-In the same way, we may in many ways simply construe discourse by making (irrelevant) additions on
many kinds. Political speakers will thus elaborate in details their own or their own group's beneficial actions
and the horror stories about their enemies. Euphemisms, litotes and hyperboles are the classical figures
describing such relative `too much' or `too little' information being given.
-Finally, and perhaps most subtle and pervasive are the semantic operations that seem to obey a principle
of substitution, to use and express a concept different from the one would expect in the present context,
as is the case for irony, metonymy and metaphor.

 EXPRESSIONS STRUCTURES
The expression structures of sounds and graphics usually also play an indirect function in emphasizing or
de-emphasizing partisan meanings. Volume (shouting and whispering), pitch and intonation of speakers
may influence modes of attention and understanding of what they say following the principles of the
ideological square. The same is true for graphical display through headlines, letter type, use of colors or
photographs. Preferred meanings are thus emphasized by shouting, high pitch, raising intonation, or by
headlines, big type, striking color or catchy photos, and the opposite is true for dispreferred meanings.

 SPEECH ACTS AND INTERACTION

A pragmatic analysis may examine which speech acts are preferred in what sub-genres of political text and
talk. Thus, whereas government declarations may largely be assertions, and official laws and regulations
have the same illocutionary force as directives (orders, commands, advice), parliamentary debates will be
more varied and typically feature assertions, questions, accusations or apologies. Political dissent
characteristically comes in the form of accusations directed against the dominant elites, which may or may
not defend (excuse, etc.) themselves against such attacks. One of the more prominent overall political acts
in all such cases will be that of legitimation. This is however not a speech act in the strict sense, but a
complex social act or process that may be accomplished by other speech acts, such as assertions, denials,
counter-accusations, and so on.

Discourse analysis and political analysis

Doing a discourse analysis of political discourse is not yet the same as doing political analysis. PDA will
only be accepted by political scientists if it has something to offer, preferably something that political
scientists would not otherwise (get to) know — at least not as well — through other methods, such a polis,
participant observation or content analysis.
The recognition of the relevance of discourse analysis presupposes realization of the perhaps trivial fact
that the many ways of doing politics' often involves engaging in discursive practices.
The study of these and other structures must show, additionally, that these structures as such play a role in
the political event and in the political process of which it is part. In other words, to assess the political
relevance of discourse analysis we need to examine in some more detail the contextual functions of various
structures and strategies of text and talk.
In sum, detailed and sophisticated political discourse analysis first of all provides direct insight into
discursive political practices such as cabinet meetings, parliamentary debates, bills and laws, bureaucratic
documents, party propaganda, media interviews, or protests by opposition parties and organizations. These
political acts, events and processes need description and analysis in their own right. We need to know how
they are organized, structured, and expressed, and what kinds of possible influence or effects they may
have on the political cognitions of the public at large.
Secondly, however, and perhaps even more interestingly, the contextual functionality of text and talk also
allows reliable inferences about political context features (like power relations, racism, group interests)
which may be taken for granted, hidden, denied or otherwise not explicitly known or formulated.
A detailed discourse analysis of such everyday political practices in that case not only contributes to our
understanding of these (discursive) practices per se, but also of their relations with the social and political
context and its detailed properties, including the constraints on discourse as well as their possible effects
on the minds of the public at large.
Also, at the `symbolic' side, what is going on here is how politicians, journalists and the public at large,
think, speak and write about issues such us racism and immigration, and how such discourse and
cognition influence political action and hence political structure. This is where discourse analysis may be
able to provide insights and explanations that otherwise would remain lacking.

CONCLUSION
Virtually all topics and issues relevant in current political science thus seem to have a prominent discursive
dimension. Indeed, what is true for racism and multiculturalism, is true for sexism and gender equality, and
the position of women, and not merely a social, but also a political issue. Socio-economic and political
rights of women, and women's concerns (equal pay, free choice of abortions, among many others) again
are not limited to political decisions on privileged access to social resources, but also related to the ways
women are represented by men in cognition and discourse, whether in political discourse, the media,
medical discourse or textbooks, as well as the access women have to public discourse (for some discourse
analytical studies of gender and politics.
Discourse analysis allows a more detailed insight into the largely discursive processes of agenda setting,
and the relations between politics, media and public opinion. Social policies are not merely abstract
properties of political action or cognition, but largely expressed in text and talk, and politically acted upon as
such, for instance in the formulation of bills, laws or regulations, which again are all political and legal
genres of discourse. Social, economic and political power may be based on special access to or control
over scarce social resources, but these are not merely material, but also symbolic, such as knowledge,
education and especially access to and control over public discourse, especially in the mass. Indeed, much
of political power may safely be operationalized in terms of the means and patterns of access and control of
politicians, parties or political movements over public discourse. Who controls public discourse, at least
partly controls the public mind, so that discourse analysis of such control is at the same time inherently a
form of political analysis. In other words, it is not so much directly the social and political economy, but
rather the symbolic economy' of language and discourse that controls the minds of political actors and
hence their actions.