Prime Ministerial Rhetoric and Recession Politics: Meaning Making in Economic Crisis Management

Abstract

Triggered by the collapse of the US mortgage market, the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2007–08 hit most of the Western world hard and fast, presenting governments and citizens with a set of stark, undeniable and immediate realities. This article examines the attempts of three prime ministers “Gordon Brown in the UK, Brian Cowen in Ireland and Kevin Rudd in Australia to meet the key leadership challenge set up by the GFC: to publicly assess, explain and account for the GFC and the accompanying economic turbulence and uncertainty as financial markets went from boom to bust. By focussing on meaning making we examine how the leaders responded to the public expectation to explain: How bad is the situation? How did it occur? Who or what is to be held responsible? What needs to be done to cope with it? Using both qualitative and quantitative methods we compare the rhetorical impacts of these leaders.

Computational linguistics analysis of leaders during crises in authoritarian regimes

“…Second, we examine the temporal dynamics of leadership to advance current understandings of how leadership unfolds over time (Shamir, 2011). Third, we add to the limited body of research that has investigated leadership phenomena outside the boundaries of western political leaders (Bligh & Robinson, 2010;Ferrari, 2007;Masters & 't Hart, 2012;Robinson & Topping, 2012). And fourth, we tested our predictions with objective measures of political discourse provided Coh-Metrix (McNamara et al, 2014), an automated system at the intersection of computational linguistics and the social sciences (described more in the methods section).…”

Comedian‐in‐Chief: Presidential Jokes as Enthymematic Crisis Rhetoric

“…In sum, presidents tested and deepened their use of enthymematic jokes to address crises during this period of WHCD speeches. Heads of government have increasingly been expected to become “national meaning‐maker in chief[s]” when facing problems or risk losing political capital (Masters and Thart , 760). But jokes could on occasion ask too much from audiences, who may have a hard time engaging in enthymemes' semantic stretches to other frames.…”

The Language of Autocrats: Leaders' Language in Natural Disaster Crises

“…Do non-democratic leaders do the same thing? We investigate strategies for blame avoidance that have been popular in political discourse analysis (Bhatia, 2008;Dijk, 1998;Masters & 't Hart, 2012), political science (Mor, 2007) organizational psychology, and social psychology (Stapleton & Hargie, 2011). More specifically, a common tactic for leaders to navigate the scrutiny following a disaster is to shift the blame to others using "negative other" presentation tactics.…”