Abstract
This article deals with the level of self-referencing in the speeches of Labour Party leaders at the annual conference, especially in the ‘Parliamentary Report’ and how this varies over time and between leaders. The article starts from the point of view that the extent to which politicians put themselves at the centre of their rhetoric is an important issue to consider when examining how they communicate with us. It also provides an insight into the personality, genuine or manufactured, of politicians. This article uses quantitative content analysis to compare the speeches of Labour leaders.
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Notes
See e.g. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu./nll/?p=1797 for one example. In addition to ‘fact checking’ one pronoun based attack on Obama it cites several others.
It is not entirely clear from the literature whether presidentialisation and personalisation are two different things or can be used interchangeably. Karvonen (2010) sees presidentialisation as being one aspect of personalisation, whereas Poguntke and Webb (2005a) include elements of personalisation within presidentialisation. In this article the term used will be personalisation since the focus of the article is the extent of self-referencing.
With one obvious exception, this gender tag so far holds true for the three main parties.
See, for example, http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1486.
The text of the State of the Union Messages used in Table 1 was acquired from The American Presidency Project (http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/) and analysed using Wordstat. The analysis of the speeches is the responsibility of the author.
Obviously the word ‘mine’ can also refer to ‘a mine’, for example a coalmine or a landmine. Using a key-word-in-context approach, however, it was found that ‘mine’ was not used in that way in any of the speeches examined here.
The texts of the parliamentary report speeches have been acquired via the Leverhulme Trust Funded project, British Political Speech (www.britishpoliticalspeech.org), led by Alan Finlayson at Swansea University. The pre-leadership speeches of Foot, Kinnock, Brown and Blair have been obtained partly from the BBC and Guardian websites, and partly through digitising Labour Party Annual Conference Reports. The analysis of the speeches is the responsibility of the author.
See, for example, http://www.chartist.org.uk/articles/britpol/may03smith.htm.
See for example http://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/poll.aspx?oItemId=2451, accessed 31 March 2011 and http://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/poll.aspx?oItemId=2450&view=wide, accessed 31 March 2011 .
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Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the Faculty of Arts and Social Science at Kingston University for making funds available for research assistance; Anthony May for providing research assistance; CEVIPOF for providing a research home away from home; and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.
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Pettitt, R. Me, myself and I: ‘Self-referencing’ in Labour Party conference leaders' speeches. Br Polit 7, 111–134 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/bp.2012.2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/bp.2012.2