The benefits of narratology in the analysis of multimodal legitimation: The case of New Democracy

Abstract

Previous studies on legitimation, multimodality and political discourse by researchers, such as Van Leeuwen, Van Dijk and Mackay, have suggested different but supplementary methods of legitimation analysis by providing a number of analytical frameworks. Multimodal legitimation research, however, seems to be in need of a better conflation of the theoretical backgrounds of disciplines, such as narratology. This article focuses on the multimodal discourse of three political advertisements of the political party New Democracy, filmed for the needs of the Greek legislative election of January 2015. What is investigated is the multimodal means by which New Democracy’s president, and Prime Minister at the time, Antonis Samaras attempted to legitimise his candidacy. In this article, I use the six-layer framework proposed by Mackay for multimodal legitimation analyses and I argue that multimodal legitimation research can benefit and get enhanced from the use of narratology and its analytical categories, such as perspective.

Narrative interactions: How project-based firms respond to Government narratives of innovation

“…Building upon the methodological approaches used by narrative researchers (Chaidas, 2018;Cunliffe, Luhman, & Boje, 2004;Czarniawska, 1997;Vaara et al 2016), we identify, examine and compare narratives of innovation at Government and project-based firm levels within a single project-based sector. In our research, government-driven narratives of innovation are mainly articulated in the textual form and secondarily in verbal and symbolic forms; whereas at firm level narratives of innovation are mainly articulated in the verbal form and secondarily in textual and symbolic forms.…”

Legitimation of value practices, value texts, and core values at public authorities

“…Legitimation 'justifies "official" action in terms of the rights and duties, politically, socially or legally associated with that role or position' (Van Dijk, 1998: 256). Furthermore, legitimation is prototypically political, a claim that appears to be corroborated by the fact that a large amount of studies on legitimation deals with political issues: campaigns or political parties (Chaidas, 2018;Mackay, 2015) including media involvement in such issues (Hart, 2017;Pasitselska, 2017), discourses of migration (Martín-Rojo and Van Dijk, 1997;Van Leeuwen and Wodak, 1999), or 'the legitimacy of war' (Chouliaraki, 2005: 2;cf. Machin and Van Leeuwen, 2005;Van Dijk, 2005).…”

“…Van Leeuwen (2007, 2008) presents a comprehensive methodological framework for the analysis of the sociological, discursive, and linguistic practice of legitimation, including a rather detailed analysis of lexico-grammatical realizations of legitimations (see the more specific description below). A related line of development is multimodal: Van Leeuwen’s framework is applied and, accordingly, developed to handle multimodal legitimation (Chaidas, 2018; Mackay, 2015). Finally, a number of studies of legitimation operate on a rhetorical level, using different sets of analytical tools, such as metaphors and frames (Hart, 2017; Näsänen, 2017), narratives (Chaidas, 2018; Näsänen, 2017), or lexico-grammatical analysis of polarization as a means for legitimation (Oddo, 2011).…”

Social class struggle as a Greek political discourse

“…Undergirded by a socio-constructivist epistemological stance, namely the idea that ‘class struggle’ is a discourse that is linguistically and semiotically constructed, this article focuses on a coherent corpus of social media texts about the ‘class struggle’ (ταξική διαμάχη (class battle), ταξικό μένος (class rancor), ταξικό μίσος (class hatred)) between Syriza and ND (cf. Chaidas, 2018). I have collected my data from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram from 1 January 2015 to 20 September 2017 using ‘qualitative e-research’ (Salmons, 2017: 178), which translates into a methodological tradition for using social media to study patterns of activity through participants’ verbal or visual expressions, actions or writings (Figure 2).…”