Journal of Language and Politics - Online First

The paper compares the representation of the November 2017 missile test in news reports by The New York Times and China Daily. The U.S. reports embody to some extent a Cold War mindset by tending to internationalize the issue and make itself appear as a victim of the crisis. Through the attribution of blame, the U.S. seeks to evade its responsibilities and maintain its hegemonic status. The Chinese reports intimate that the crisis is mainly a problem between the U.S. and the Korean Peninsula. These reports tend to present China as a responsible stakeholder seeking to help solve the issue through communication and dialogue. The analysis of these differences is informed theoretically by perceived differences in culture. The paper concludes that the discourse patterns of these reports index a rising China and a shift in the balance of power in international politics.

Politicians often quote opponents in political debates so as to highlight contradictions between the opponents’ prior statements and their current political actions, thus construing their political character negatively. From a dialogic perspective, reported speech, alternatively termed “extra-vocalisation”, can be defined as a tool used by speakers to deny alternative points of view and justify their own positions, while simultaneously positioning the audience in agreement with the speaker’s own views. Drawing on this notion of extra-vocalisation, the current study analyses a Japanese political debate to show how politicians use different types of voice to validate their own political ideologies and devalue opposing views. In doing so, the study also identifies the relevant linguistic resources of Japanese in order to show how dialogic positioning via extra-vocalisation is manifested in Japanese, and highlight the fact each language provides its own resources to convey such meanings.

This paper seeks to show how male politicians can draw on performances of masculinity to appeal to voters. The paper uses former UK Prime Minister David Cameron as an example of how performances of masculinity interact with the opportunistic use of populist forms of political engagement. It argues that while Cameron’s performances of populism are often situated in compatible policy initiatives such as the “big society”, we can also identify a more sustained deployment of masculine discourse in “performances” of alignment with the people. This paper shows how these gendered performances of political leaders mirror changes in society, while exploring how they can also be politically hazardous. Whilst the “new man” might appeal to Western voters, this paper shows how Cameron draws on this performance of masculinity in his first term as UK prime minister; at the same time, showing the limits to such appeal in an age of austerity.

Since the 1990s, media commentators in the UK and elsewhere have praised women for introducing a “visibly different style of politics”, one symbol of which is the alleged preference of female politicians for a less adversarial and more co-operative style of political speech. Drawing on an analysis of the 2015 UK General Election campaign, we argue that this notion of women’s “different voice” has become increasingly central to the media’s construction of prominent female politicians as public figures, despite the evidence that it does not reflect any clear-cut pattern of differentiation between male and female political speakers of equivalent status and experience. Though it may seem to be an advance on previous negative representations of female politicians, we suggest that it reproduces – albeit in a “modernized” form – the long-established tendency of the media to evaluate women in relation to gendered norms and expectations, while men are judged as individuals.

This paper examines the media representations of scandalous parliamentary talk on same-sex child fostering in the discourses of representatives of the radical-right Golden Dawn party in Greece, but also by an MP of the conservative ANEL party of the SYRIZA-ANEL joint government at the time. Through discourse- and conversation analysis of online articles and a broadcast interview, it is shown that the media framing of populist statements is negotiated. Moreover, the interview enacts a subtly achieved interactional synergy between the interviewer and the politician, thus failing to address the issues through substantive public dialogue. It is argued that the process of (re)mediating racist or homophobic talk has the potential to serve as a publicity tool creating increased visibility for right-wing populist politicians, their core ideologies and policy platforms. This creates a challenge for practitioners of journalism who must balance disparate concerns in reporting on scandalous talk.

This essay analyses the use of the term “gender madness” and “lost manliness” in the discourse of the right-wing populist Alternative für Deutschland (AFD). It draws on analyses of public statements, policy papers, manifestos and public speeches. It argues that the “gender” theme constitutes a discoursive cluster that is used link otherwise eclectic policies. Furthermore, it is utilised to articulate certain folkish and ethno-nationalist ideas while at the same time helping to avoid open references to extremist language. By presenting itself as the custodian of traditional heterosexuality and family values the AFD creates yet another dimension of the populist dichotomy of “us” versus “them”. This is underpinned by a sophisticated media strategy that seeks create an image of authenticity and immediacy between party and supporters. On the whole, the piece analyses and explains the central importance of “anti-genderism” in the discourse of the populist right in Germany.

The analysis of the different ideological constructions around the languages of Spain shows two main metaphors that support the linguistic conflict experienced in the last three or four decades: the container metaphor (languages conceived as entities that are completely independent of each other) and the ecological metaphor (each language occupies a specific niche for historical reasons). The study of complexity provides a new metaphor as a new solution for this conflict, i.e. the eco-biosociological metaphor, which is based on the assumption that what is human cannot be explained exclusively by biological factors, but instead by communicative action in cooperation with others above all. To illustrate the first two metaphors, in this paper we consider the linguistic position of two new parties: En Marea and En Comú-Podem.

Populism has been on the rise in Europe, especially in the last decade. Finland is no exception, and a populist party ‘The Finns Party’ has gained momentum since the 2011 parliamentary election. The purpose of this paper is to examine the discourses of the Finns Party in their official releases on immigration and language in the 2015 parliamentary election. The socio-politically situated examination draws from Foucauldian Discourse Analysis, especially the concepts of biopower, biopolitics, racism, governmentality and subject position. In addition, language identity, language ideologies, and populism are used to discuss how linguistic identity and ideology are perceived and constructed in the data, especially in terms of discourses of inclusion and exclusion of ethnically Finnish but linguistically non-dominant groups, and immigrants.