Article published in:
Pragmatics and Society
Vol. 8:4 (2017) ► pp. 520–541

Order in disorder

Audience responses and political rhetoric in speeches from the second round of the 2012 French presidential election

| Universidad Tecnológica Centroamericana (UNITEC)
| University of York
Recent research has established that Japanese political oratory and audience behaviour (Bull & Feldman 2011; Feldman & Bull 2012) are fundamentally different to those found in British political speeches (Heritage & Greatbatch 1986). To further develop these cross-cultural analyses of political rhetoric, speaker-audience interaction was analysed in ten speeches by the two second-round candidates in the 2012 French presidential elections (François Hollande; Nicolas Sarkozy). Analogous to British speeches, French speeches were characterised by “implicit” affiliative response invitations and asynchronous speaker-audience interaction, in contrast to Japanese “explicit” invitations and synchrony. These results were interpreted in terms of Hofstede’s (2001) individualism-collectivism cultural dimensions. Dissimilarities in audience responses between the two candidates were also identified and discussed. The analysis of cross-cultural differences continues to reveal the intricate differences between societies, and ensures academic understanding on rhetoric is not boxed into crude universal rules.
Keywords: political speeches, rhetoric, audience response, applause, French, cross-cultural analysis
Published online: 19 January 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.8.4.03led
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