Trust in Democratic Government in a Post-Truth Age

Garland, Ruth

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-77576-6_10

Cited by 7 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…These include 25 interviews with journalists, special advisers and former and serving civil service communicators spanning the period from the 1960s to 2013. These were conducted as part of a wider longitudinal research project into UK government communications after 1979 (Garland, 2021). Much of the archival material relates to 241 fortnightly, weekly, then daily meetings of the Ministerial Committee on the Coordination and Presentation of Government Policy (EDCP), a committee set up by John Major in 1995 and chaired by the deputy prime minister, Michael Heseltine, to manage presentational issues that were already undermining Major's authority (National Archives, 1995/1996).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The UK Prime Minister John Major's seven years in office (1990–1997) is often passed over as a disastrous interlude between two eras in political PR – the period of Thatcherite hegemony in the British national media between 1979 and 1990 (Wilkes-Hegg et al ., 2012) and the so-called age of political spin under Blair from 1997 to 2005 (Garland, 2021). This paper argues that the Major period is worth independent scrutiny, not only because archival material has recently become available but because the experiences of Major's Number 10 [1] echo more recent Conservative governments' struggles under Boris Johnson during his three-year premiership (2019–2022), despite the contrasting characters and governing styles of the two leaders.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Earlier studies have suggested that, throughout the post-war period, government public relations as a discipline, a form of practice, a field of power and an institution have been consistently marginalised in what appears to be a takeover by political appointees who manage the media on behalf of ministers and the Prime Minister (Garland, 2017, 2021). What are the dynamics behind this marginalisation, and is this related to the ongoing siege mentality in government-media relations?…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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No escape from the No.10. bunker? UK government news management under siege: John Major (1990–97) and Boris Johnson (2019–2022)

Garland

2023

CCIJ

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PurposeThis study draws parallels between the Major and Johnson eras to reclaim a discursive space beyond the media and political battlefields to examine long-term systemic failure of government PR.Design/methodology/approachAs part of a wider study into government communications from 1979 to date, this paper draws on evidence from government archives from the 1990s, as well as contemporary accounts, official documents, media accounts, memoirs and biographies, to examine the PR record of two Conservative administrations divided by three decades.FindingsNews management during the Major premiership is worth serious scrutiny, not just as an interlude between two media-friendly Prime Ministers, Thatcher and Blair, but in comparison to Boris Johnson's struggle to contain the news narrative between 2019 and 2022. Both administrations experienced terminal reputational crises during their closing years but their means of managing the news were counter-productive and damaging to public trust (65).Practical implicationsDoes this failure in public communication illustrate a systemic dysfunction in government-media relations and, if so, what is the role of government PR in these circumstances?Originality/valueThis article uses a comparison between fixed and moving variables associated with two very different administrations to identify the causes of ongoing systemic failure in government communication.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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No escape from the No.10. bunker? UK government news management under siege: John Major (1990–97) and Boris Johnson (2019–2022)

Garland

2023

CCIJ

Self Cite

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“…These leaders’ behaviours also diverged in the way they approached compliance with the restrictions imposed as well as in their related communication strategies ( Garland, 2021 ). From the beginning of the pandemic, Sturgeon would stress the gravity of the situation and adopt a ‘we are in this together’ stance, showing that she was also personally affected by the stringency of the rules.…”

Section: Facing the Covid-19 Health Crisis: Sturgeon And Johnsonmentioning

confidence: 99%

Britain’s COVID-19 battle: The role of political leaders in shaping the responses to the pandemic

Thiers

Wehner

2023

The British Journal of Politics and International Relations

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This article introduces an analytical framework to trace and compare leaders’ different types of behaviours to the health crisis posed by COVID-19, following the analytical benefits of Leadership Trait Analysis. It examines Boris Johnson’s and Nicola Sturgeon’s diverging initial responses to the pandemic’s onset. We employ the Leadership Trait Analysis to shed light on three main differences in their respective leadership styles: risk-proneness versus risk-aversion; flexibility versus rigidity and rule advocacy versus rule ambivalence. Crises are one of the more fruitful situations in which to study leaders as their personal characteristics become central to the decision-making process. Thus, we employ an agent-centred and political psychology approach to analyse leaders’ behaviour and make sense of their divergent management styles. The results show that the differences between these leaders’ approaches to handling this global health crisis can be partly explained by their level of openness to information and their task versus relationship focus.

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“…Second, officeholders are frequently criticized for engaging in deceptive communication or dishonest acts that may undermine citizen’s trust in political representatives and democratic institutions more generally (e.g., Arendt, 1972 ; Garland, 2021 ; Mercieca, 2020 ). Normatively, the truthfulness of the political leaders is vital for democracy ( Hansson & Kröger, 2021 ), and surveys indicate that people expect politicians to display integrity and keep their promises (e.g., Valgarðsson et al, 2021 ).…”

Section: Blame and Protest In Politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Discursive Strategies of Blaming: The Language of Judgment and Political Protest Online

Hansson

Page

Fuoli

2022

Social Media + Society

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Modern politics is permeated by blame games—symbolic struggles over the blameworthiness or otherwise of various social actors. In this article, we develop a framework for identifying different strategies of blaming that protesters use on social media to criticize and delegitimize governments and political leaders. We draw on the systemic functional linguistic theory of Appraisal to distinguish between blame attributions based on negative judgments of the target’s (1) capacity, such as references to their incompetence and policy failures; (2) veracity, questioning their truthfulness or honesty via references to deceitful character or dishonest acts and utterances; (3) propriety, questioning their moral standing by references to, for instance, corruption; and (4) tenacity, suggesting that the politicians are not dependable due to, for example, dithering. We add to this a further threefold distinction based on whether blaming is focused on the target’s (1) bad character, (2) bad behavior, or (3) negative outcomes that the target either caused or did not prevent from happening. To illustrate the approach, we analyze a corpus of replies by Twitter users to tweets by British government ministers about two highly contentious issues, Covid-19 and Brexit, in 2020–2021. We suggest that the methodology outlined here could provide a useful avenue for systematically revealing and comparing a variety of realizations of blaming in large datasets of online conflict talk, thereby providing a more fine-grained understanding of the practices of protest and delegitimation in modern politics.

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Trust in Democratic Government in a Post-Truth Age

Cited by 7 publications

References 8 publications

No escape from the No.10. bunker? UK government news management under siege: John Major (1990–97) and Boris Johnson (2019–2022)

No escape from the No.10. bunker? UK government news management under siege: John Major (1990–97) and Boris Johnson (2019–2022)

Britain’s COVID-19 battle: The role of political leaders in shaping the responses to the pandemic

Discursive Strategies of Blaming: The Language of Judgment and Political Protest Online

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