Weapons and Words: Rhetorical Studies of the Gabrielle Giffords Shootings

Incivility in parliaments is always prominently displayed in media reports, often with the implicit or explicit commentary that the situation is getting worse. This paper processes and analyses the records of verbal interactions in the Australian Parliament for over 100 years to provide a first approximation on the evolution of civility. It provides a framework for understanding the multidimensional nature of civility that examines both ‘politeness’ and ‘argumentation’, with the latter grounded in notions of public-mindedness. The analysis focuses on the interactions between parties of the orators and the party in power, the chamber of utterance, and the year. The results indicate that instances of impoliteness have increased since the 1970s but only modestly and remain highly infrequent. Minor parties, particularly those representing right-wing and Green politics are more likely to use dismissive or offensive language than the dominant centre-left and centre-right parties, although direct insults and swearwords are the particular remits of right-wing ‘system-wrecker’ parties. All these minor parties, nonetheless, also display higher levels of argumentation in their interventions. This combination of aggressive language and increased argumentation highlights the pressures on minor parties to convey their points in a forceful way, a challenge that is particularly pressing in two-party systems like the Australian one.

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Political Parties and Civility in Parliament: The Case of Australia from 1901 to 2020

Arranz

Zech

Bonotti

2023

Parliamentary Affairs

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Uncivil Name‐Calling in the U.S. Presidency, 1933–2018

Coe¹,

Park-Ozee²

2019

Pres Stud Q

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Political incivility in the United States is a growing concern among both citizens and scholars. Prior research focusing on incivility among political elites has largely neglected the presidency, however. Thus, popular claims that Donald Trump is particularly uncivil have not yet been subjected to empirical scrutiny vis‐à‐vis presidential norms. The present study undertakes a large‐scale quantitative content analysis of modern presidential communication to provide insight into one key form of incivility: name‐calling. We find that uncivil name‐calling is generally rare in the presidency, and that three presidents—Harry S. Truman, George H. W. Bush, and especially Donald Trump—are outliers in the frequency with which they employ this form of communication.

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Finding congressional voice: Fenno’s paradox and congressional public relations in the aftermath of the 2017 congressional baseball shooting

Reed

2024

Public Relations Inquiry

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Scholarship on congressional public relations has been limited and largely focused on the relationships between individual members and their constituents rather than on Congress as an institution. Unlike other organizations, the United States Congress lacks a cohesive organizational identity, with members often “running against Congress” or bifurcated into partisan camps. On June 14th, 2017, shooter James Hodgkinson opened fire on Republican members of Congress, their staff, and members of their families as they practiced for the annual Congressional Baseball Game for Charity, a rare but long-standing tradition of bipartisan camaraderie among members. In the days that followed, members in both chambers responded to the attack through statements, interviews, floor speeches, and social media posts. I analyze 106 of these messages through the lenses of organizational voice and organizational identity. I argue that by positioning the attack as an assault on Congress and on the purity of America’s pastime, members rejected partisan framings of the attack while espousing a shared rejection of political violence. Most importantly, members constituted a cohesive, bipartisan identity for Congress that stood in opposition to dominant trends of affective polarization and declining social capital among members. The study illustrates the constitutive potential of restorative rhetoric following a disaster and the unique insights to be gleaned from an institutional understanding of congressional public relations.

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Weapons and Words: Rhetorical Studies of the Gabrielle Giffords Shootings

Cited by 5 publications

References 2 publications

Political Parties and Civility in Parliament: The Case of Australia from 1901 to 2020

Political Parties and Civility in Parliament: The Case of Australia from 1901 to 2020

Uncivil Name‐Calling in the U.S. Presidency, 1933–2018

Finding congressional voice: Fenno’s paradox and congressional public relations in the aftermath of the 2017 congressional baseball shooting

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