Cover not available
Part of
Doing Politics: Discursivity, performativity and mediation in political discourse
Edited by Michael Kranert and Geraldine Horan
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 80] 2018
► pp. 333–360

Chapter 14
Reading political minds

“Backstage” politics in audience reception

Audiences often speculate about why it is politicians behave in the way they do and say the things they say. Indeed, journalists and academics are frequently called upon to decode these behaviours for “lay” audiences. An integral part of “doing” politics is thus to reconstruct the backstage political processes leading to politicians’ frontstage performances (see Wodak 2009). To account for this speculative activity, I draw on Goffman’s (1981) notion of the “production format” of discourse, alongside concepts from cognitive and social psychology, specifically Schema Theory, Attribution Theory and Theory of Mind. To illustrate this interdisciplinary framework, I analyse journalistic reactions to a speech by the British politician and former Labour Party leader Ed Miliband.
Keywords: Ed Miliband, Theory of Mind, Attribution Theory, production format, Goffman, Schema Theory, Labour Party, ad hocing, schema, political discourse
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • “Backstage” politics
  • Modelling the backstage area
  • Reading political minds
  • Mind modelling and attribution in discourse
    • “Cynical image management” versus “changing the political weather”
    • Saying things the audience want to hear
  • Summary and conclusions
  • Acknowledgement
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 12 December 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.80.14bro
References (38)
References
Ames, Daniel R., and Malia F. Mason. 2012. “Mind perception”. In The SAGE Handbook of Social Cognition, ed. by Susan T. Fiske, and C. Neil Macrae, 15–137. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Apperly, Ian A. 2012. “What is ‘Theory of Mind’? Concepts, cognitive processes and individual differences.” The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 65 (5): 825–839.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Browse, Sam. 2018. Cognitive Rhetoric: The Cognitive Poetics of Political Discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baron-Cohen, Simon. 1995. Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Charteris-Black, Jonathan. 2004. Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis. Basingstoke: Palgrave.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chen, Ya-mei. 2011. “The Ideological Construction of Solidarity in Translated Newspaper Commentaries: Context Models and Inter-subjective Positioning.” Discourse and Society 22 (6): 693–722.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chick, Victoria, and Anne Pettifor. 2010. “The Economic Consequences of Mr Osborne.” [URL] [online] < [URL]> (Accessed: 14 June 2016).
Cook, Guy. 1994. Discourse and Literature: The Interplay of Form and Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan. 2000. “An Approach to Characterisation: The Case of Katherina in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew.” Language and Literature 9 (4): 291–316.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Eysenck, Michael W., and Mark T. Keane. 1990. Cognitive Psychology: A Student’s Handbook. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Fairclough, Norman. 2003. Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fetzer, Anita. 2007. “Challenges in Political Interviews: An Intercultural Analysis.” In Political Discourse in the Media, ed. by Anita Fetzer, and Gerda Eva Lauerbach, 163–196. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fiske, Susan T., and Shelley E. Taylor. 2013. Social Cognition: From Brains to Culture (2nd edn). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Freedland, Jonathan. 2014. “Ed Miliband: coherent and thoughtful – but still not yet looking the part.” The Guardian [online]. <[URL]> (Accessed: 14 June 2016)
Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity.Google Scholar
Gavins, Joanna. 2005. “(Re)thinking Modality: A Text-World Perspective.” Journal of Literary Semantics 34 (2): 79–93.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gilbert, Daniel T. (1998) “Ordinary Personology.” In The Handbook of Social Psychology (4th edn), ed. by Daniel T. Gilbert, Susan T. Fiske, and Gardner Lindzey, 89–150. New York: McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
Goffman, Ervine. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
. 1981. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Halligan, Liam. 2014. “Ed Miliband was too scared to talk about the £100bn deficit.” The Telegraph [online] <[URL]> (Accessed: 14 June 2016).
Hart, Chris. 2014. Discourse, Grammar and Ideology. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Heider, Fritz. 1958. The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations. New York: Wiley.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jones, Edward E., and Keith Davis. 1965. “From Acts to Dispositions: The Attribution Process in Person Perception.” In Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 2), ed. by Leonard Berkowitz, 220–26. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Jones, Edward E., and Victor A. Harris. 1967. “The Attribution of Attitudes.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 3: 1–24.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Koller, Veronika. 2005. “Critical Discourse Analysis and Social Cognition: Evidence from Business Media Discourse.” Discourse and Society 16 (2): 199–224.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Krugman, Paul. 2015. “The austerity delusion.” The Guardian [online] <[URL]> (Accessed: 14 June 2016).
Lakoff, George. 2002. Moral Politics. Chicago: Chicago University Press.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey, and Mick Short. 2007. Style in Fiction. Harlow: Pearson Longman.Google Scholar
Premack, David, and Guy Woodruff. 1978. “Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of Mind?” Behavioural and Brain Sciences 1 (4): 515–526.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ross, L. 1977. “The Intuitive Psychologist and his Shortcomings.” In Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 10), ed. by Leonard Berkowitz, 173–220. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Simpson, Paul. 1993. Language, Ideology and Point of View. London: Routledge.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stieglitz, Joseph. 2014. “Europe’s Austerity Zombies.” Project Syndicate [online] <[URL]> (Accessed: 14 June 2016).
Stockwell, Peter. 2009. Texture: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Reading. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
The Telegraph. 2014. “Ed Balls turns on Ed Miliband for forgetting deficit.” The Telegraph [online] <[URL]> (Accessed: 14 June 2016).
The Guardian. 2014. “Ed Balls sets out Labour’s economy plan – video.” The Guardian [online] <[URL]> (Accessed: 14 June 2016)
Van Dijk, Teun. 1989. “Race, Riots and the Press: An Analysis of Editorials in the British Press about the 1985 Disorders.” Gazette 43: 229–253.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 1992. “Racism and Argumentation: ‘Race Riot’ Rhetoric in Tabloid Editorials.” In Argumentation Illuminated, ed. by Frans H. van Eemeren, 243–257. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Wodak, Ruth. 2009. The Discourse of Politics in Action: Politics as Usual. Basingstoke: Palgrave.Google Scholar
Cited by (4)

Cited by four other publications

Browse, Sam
2021. Chapter 4. Towards an empirical stylistics of critical reception. In Style and Reader Response [Linguistic Approaches to Literature, 36], ► pp. 61 ff. DOI logo
Gibbons, Alison & Sara Whiteley
2021. Do worlds have (fourth) walls? A Text World Theory approach to direct address in Fleabag. Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 30:2 ► pp. 105 ff. DOI logo
Browse, Sam & Mari Hatavara
2019. “I can tell the difference between fiction and reality”. Narrative Inquiry 29:2 ► pp. 333 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2018. Cognitive Rhetoric [Linguistic Approaches to Literature, 31], DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 14 october 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.