Narrating the Political Self



Narrating the Political Self

In the age of mediatized mass democracies, political discourse in the media is an important means for ordinary people to encounter politics (Lauerbach & Fetzer, 2007). This is particularly true of political debates and interviews, in which political information is transmitted in dialogue-anchored forms. Against this background, different discourse genres, such as political interviews, panel interviews or talk shows provide the opportunity, first, to translate politics, which has been frequently conceptualized as a macro structural phenomenon, into text and talk (Chilton & Schäffner, 2002); second, to transfer macro-domain oriented politics to the micro domain; and third, to personify party-political programs, agendas and ideologies. Furthermore, the dialogic nature of these genres allows for the presentation of symbolic politics (Sarcinelli, 1987) as a language game composed of questions and answers, in which the politician's and journalist's argumentation and their underlying reasoning and negotiation of meaning are made explicit. This sort of contextualization facilitates and supports the comprehension of macro politics, making it more accessible to the general public.

Political parties tend to focus on the production of politics, which takes place behind the scenes, while politicians tend to focus on its presentation, which takes place in the public stage. On that stage, public agents co-construct, negotiate and contextualize politics, and it is the job of the politician to use all possible means inherent to the contextual constraints and requirements of mass media to present her/his political agenda in a credible and responsible manner to a heterogeneous audience, whose members are potential voters.

Political discourse also feeds on a differentiation between politics as an ideological system and the management of politics in society (Charaudeau, 2005: 34). The latter considers political action, political decision-making processes and the traditional fields of action and control, such as law-making procedures, party politics and the relation between legislative and utive branches, and the administration, as well as the fields of public participation and opinion formation in politics (Wodak, 2008: 297). But politics is no longer a clear-cut domain. Its boundaries have become more and more blurred as they intersect with mass media and economy.

In the late modern discursive formation of political discourse, access to political decision-making processes and political action are no longer the sole privilege of the traditional domain of politics and its political agents. The major transformations in the public sphere concern the role and actions of civil society and its citizens who thus take part in the formation of political opinions. Because of that traditional politics and traditional politicians require the media to make their political actions more transparent. Against this background, the formation of public opinion takes place in the media and through the media. There are, however, different logics that control the public media space, namely those of technologization and commercialization. First, the technologization of communication enables the agents to have a greater number of mediated encounters using diverse genres, such as forum discussions, chats and weblogs.

As a consequence, the contexts in which political topics emerge multiply (Charaudeau, ...