Prime Ministers and Rhetorical Governance

D. Grube

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137318367
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Prime Ministers in Westminister style democracies are forever talking to and communicating with the electorate. This ground-breaking book explores and analyses the uses of political rhetoric by Prime Ministers to explore patterns of communication and shows that the manner in which they talk to the electorate is central to day-to-day governance.

1

The Mutual Delusion

In his 2010 autobiography, Tony Blair reflected on the level of public expectation that had accompanied his arrival in office in 1997. He looked back on a force that was both ‘unstoppable’ and yet ‘delusional’.

It seemed unreal because it was unreal. It was understandable the people should feel like that; understandable that I should want to lead it; understandable that together we became an unstoppable force. But it was, in a profound way, a deception on both our parts – not a deception knowingly organised or originating from bad faith or bad motives, but one born of the hope that achievement and hard choices could somehow be decoupled. A delusion perhaps describes it better. (Blair, 2010, p. 15)

The mutual delusion described by Blair is not unique to his experience as an incoming prime minister. When voters turn from a long-term incumbent government, they generally move en mass. Two-party Westminster systems allow for persistent political earthquakes every ten to twenty years when the electorate decides that it’s time to move. They thirst for change. They demand reform. They decry old realities and new decays. And as they walk into a polling booth to make their marks on a piece of paper, they do so with an overwhelming sense of expectation that this time things will change.

Once the euphoria subsides, the cynicism unavoidably begins to return, as voters decide that politicians really are ‘all the same’. The same patterns in policy-making are seen to emerge. It begins with an energetic first hundred days of office, consummating the bargain with voters and engendering a honeymoon glow that looks like it will never fade. Within a year, the mistakes begin to emerge: the policy failures, the ideas abandoned for want of funds, the ministers dismissed for taking their eye off the policy ball. The hope fades. The next election win is delivered without fanfare and without faith by an electorate not yet ready to give the other side another go. The government begins to trade less on its prescriptions for the future and more on its experience. It may no longer be exciting, but at least it’s a ‘safe pair of hands’ in troubled times. Finally, perhaps after another election or perhaps before, the rot completely sets in. The ‘safe pair of hands’ drops the ball so often that the electorate are once again craving something new – someone to tell them that they can legitimately hope that the future can in fact be brighter than they had ever dreamed possible. And so the cycle turns.

Instinctively, we know this pattern to be true. Empirically, it is beyond challenge. So why do voters keep believing that it will be different? Or to use Blair’s words, why are voters periodically convinced that ‘achievement and hard choices’ can in fact be decoupled? This book will search for the answer to that question in the way that prime ministers shape and use political rhetoric. We are familiar with the refrain from voters that ‘we’ve heard it all before’. This book will demonstrate that the reason voters feel like they’ve heard it all before is because in fact they have. There are patterns in the speeches that prime ministers make. Like an old-style jukebox, there are only a certain number of records in the machine. Whilst each new prime minister presents as a fresh DJ with their own ideas, inevitably they will play the same songs in the same order as the last DJ.

‘Good riddance’ is a hit song that stays in the top of the charts for the whole of the first term, explaining that everything was all the fault of the last government. The rousing sounds of ‘all fired up’ accompany us as the government introduces the policies that they claim will re-shape the future. After a term, the music changes. The tone is a little darker. Think ‘long and winding road’ by the Beatles, as the government promises to stay with you for the long haul to see through the policy changes that they have begun. After a second term, they can tell you are starting to lose faith. Two songs appear on permanent rotation – ‘after all that we’ve been through’ reminds you that this government has worked and bled for you and when they were unfaithful they didn’t mean it; and don’t trust the ‘boys of summer’ – those fresh-faced opposition types who can’t possibly love you the way this government does. With the full gamut of musical history to choose from, why do our political leaders keep returning to the same tracks? Don’t they know we’ve heard them before?

In political studies, patterns of behaviour of this kind demonstrate that there are institutional forces at play. There are elements constraining the individual agency of prime ministerial actors in some way so that they choose to engage in the same formulaic – even ritualistic – forms of political rhetoric time and again. Their rhetoric is a prisoner of those institutional forces, in the same way that a welfare policy or an education policy is hemmed into path dependency by the policies of past governments. Politicians like to talk. At times, it seems impossible to get them to do anything else. It’s because they know, instinctively, that talking is important. Political rhetoric has long been central to our understanding of politics. It shapes how we view the world and the challenges it contains. From a ‘war on terror’ to ‘welfare cheats’, talk provides the labels through which we judge political realities. The soaring words of Barack Obama implore us to hope, just as the sober words of Winston Churchill inspire us to determined defiance. But political talk has a central function that goes far beyond the need to rouse people at election time or in times of great crisis. Persuasive political talk – rhetoric – is central to the practice of modern government itself.

Rhetoric is first and foremost a tool of persuasion. Its purpose is to sway the minds of its listeners. Political actors in all political systems use political rhetoric in many aspects of their role. Even despots look to rhetoric as a way to reassure their own people that their dictator is in fact a force for benevolence and good in their lives. The lengthy speeches of Saddam Hussein, or Fidel Castro, set out frames for the way that their people should see the world. They try to convince audiences that they are united in common cause against enemies at home or abroad – be it capitalism, or the United States, or local traitors and terrorists who are opposing the regime.

In democracies, the rhetorical task is just as complex – if not in fact more so. Democratic leaders use political rhetoric to frame electoral choices for voters, to launch new policies, and to defend themselves from the attacks of political opponents. So central are these rhetorical activities to the way we understand politics that they have become an integral part of the way we are governed – central to what is termed ‘governance’ in scholarly debates.

Despite this, political rhetoric is a topic that until recently has remained remarkably understudied outside the United States, although there have been some notable exceptions. Paul Corcoran has examined the rhetoric of concession speeches in both the Australian and American context (1998, 1994), and Boris Kabanoff et al. (2001) have utilised DICTION software to undertake a content analysis of the conference speeches of two Australian party leaders. Research has been undertaken on the use of metaphor in political rhetoric in both the United Kingdom and Australia (Charteris-Black, 2011; Roan and White, 2010), and there have been multiple compilations in many jurisdictions of the speeches of various political leaders.¹ These have been supplemented by the memoirs of ministerial staffers and speechwriters reflecting on the processes involved in spawning political rhetoric.² Work has been undertaken on the role of the media in political communication and the influence it has in how an electoral audience experiences political rhetoric through the media.³ There have also been several specific studies on aspects of political rhetoric in terms of its effect on conceptions of national identity, the quality of political leadership and on its use in the setting out of party platforms during an election campaign.⁴

Scholarship on the US presidency has provided extensive analyses of how presidents have made use of their rhetorical pulpit – both historically and in contemporary debates.⁵ As I discuss further below, there are strong institutional reasons why US presidents have used rhetoric in the way that they have. Faced with a system of government constitutionally ingrained with checks and balances designed to restrain presidents, rhetoric has provided a way to occasionally break those shackles. In the teeth of an often-intransigent congress that tries to restrict their programme, presidents reach out past other lawmakers to connect with the people directly. When skilfully done, they can effectively enlist voters to join them in a battle against their mutual enemy – a congress that is refusing to pass laws necessary for the good government of the United States. Of course, as was so frequently demonstrated in the 2012 debates to avert the American ‘fiscal cliff’ at the end of the year, the same rhetorical tools are available to congressional leaders seeking to reach out directly to the people to frame the presidency as the roadblock to true progress.

In response to the comparatively scarce scholarly debate about rhetoric in Westminster democracies, this book seeks to do two things. Firstly, it draws on insights into how the ‘rhetorical presidency’ operates in the United States to analyse the ways in which the ‘rhetorical prime minister’ operates in a Westminster parliamentary democracy. Secondly, having established the central role of the ‘rhetorical prime ministership’ in Westminster governance, it will seek to probe some of the institutionalised patterns of rhetoric that have emerged – patterns that now restrict the rhetorical freedom of choice available to prime ministers.

To produce a robust analysis less likely to be slanted by the idiosyncrasies of individual countries, the book draws on material from four comparable, well-established Westminster system jurisdictions: Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and New Zealand. Across all four jurisdictions, I will argue that prime ministers are not in fact free and unencumbered in the rhetorical choices they can make. Political rhetoric follows set patterns and cycles that govern the way prime ministers frame arguments and define issues. The ‘rhetorical prime minister’ has become an institution in and of itself, and like all institutions, rules and traditions have emerged that govern how it can operate.

The idea that there are cycles that affect politics is long established. We often hear talk in the media of the ‘electoral cycle’, of ‘recycled’ policy ideas, and even the cycle that sees long-term governments jettisoned in order to give the opposition a go. I argue here that there are rhetorical cycles that are as real and as fixed as electoral cycles, and that they play every bit as important a part in the behaviour of political actors as the electoral cycle does. The significance of this resides in the fact that these repetitive patterns of speech create the sense that political leaders are ‘talking in circles’, leading to the common perception that people have ‘heard it all before’. This repetitious rhetoric makes political leaders sound inauthentic. And that perceived lack of authenticity in turn feeds the growing popular distrust of politics and politicians. The way political rhetoric is being used therefore has important consequences for trust in government. I argue that the forces that shape institutionalised forms of political rhetoric are in effect institutionalising distrust within parliamentary democracies.

This is not a book about rhetorical devices. It does not seek to assess metaphors or the linguistic techniques used in the creation of rhetoric. Important work has examined the various rhetorical techniques that political actors have at their disposal, and has charted its effects. For example, in the United Kingdom, Jonathan Charteris-Black’s work Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor (2011) unpacks the way in which metaphors shape and frame ideas in political speech. Various works by Alan Finlayson (e.g. 2004, 2006, 2007) have demonstrated the centrality of rhetoric to modern politics and offered methodological tools that might be used to probe its effects. My purpose here is different. I analyse rhetoric as an act of political leadership and examine the role it plays in contemporary governance. My question is not how does it persuade, but rather why is it significant that it does so?

As suggested in the discussion above, the field of political rhetoric is dominated by studies centring on the United States. The seminal work in the field is The Rhetorical Presidency (1987) by Jeffrey Tulis, which has led to many follow-up studies on the use of rhetoric by American presidents (see, for example, Medhurst, 1996a, 1996b; Ellis, 1998; Tulis, 2007; Stuckey, 2010). Tulis effectively conceptualised the workings of the US presidency as having institutional force beyond the mere fact of occupation of the office. Every American president has available to them, as an institutionalised form of power, the ‘rhetorical presidency’. It is in essence the pulpit from which all American presidents speak.

Tulis and others have probed the structural factors within the US system of government that have created the conditions in which an institution like the rhetorical presidency could emerge. Under the classic Montesquieun separation of powers model, the three great institutions of government in the US system are the presidency, the congress and the Supreme Court. For the presidency to exert its dominance over the other two branches of government, the president must speak over the heads of the other two, directly to the people themselves. In essence, the president has no power base independent of the democratic support of those who voted him or her into office. In the face of an intransigent congress, or an activist Supreme Court, the rhetorical presidency is the institutional megaphone that allows a president to speak directly to the only powerbase that matters – the people themselves. Its purpose, in classic Neustadtian terms, is simply to persuade. It has no power to compel, but this has not compromised its usefulness for generations of presidents.

Under the tenets of the Westminster system, no such institutional imperative exists to explain why prime ministerial speech has become so important. In a parliamentary system, a prime minister lives and dies by her or his ability to command a majority on the floor of the parliament. If they have such a majority, and can consistently enforce it, they have the ability to implement their policies of choice whether the people are in agreement or not. In the United States, a congress that has no confidence in the president can pose political difficulties, but it does not have the power of dismissal – short of a successful impeachment process. Nevertheless, it can block a policy programme, which is why the rhetorical presidency reaches out directly to the people in the hope that public opinion will back the president’s position and sway the congress into acquiescence (see Kernell, 2006). In theory, a Westminster prime minister has only to sway the parliament – which they usually already control – in order to get their programme through. Why then do prime ministers spend so much time and energy giving speeches outside the parliament itself?

The historical research of Richard Toye has led him to examine the British prime ministership since 1945 through the prism of Tulis’ concept, applying it to what he terms the ‘rhetorical premiership’ (2011). Toye traces the historical emergence of the ‘rhetorical premiership’ and its impact in terms of a prime minister’s ability to lead successfully. His work provides an important foundation for studies of prime ministerial rhetoric in contemporary contexts. Contemporary practice suggests that the rhetorical premiership is indeed an institutional reality of modern Westminster government. Its historical origins and contemporary shape are discussed in depth in the next chapter.

Key policy speeches by prime ministers are frequently now given outside of parliaments across the Westminster world. Toye’s study (2011) illustrates the growth of external speeches from 1945 to 2010. In other words, prime ministers are prepared to go outside the base of their constitutional and institutional power – i.e. the ability to command a majority on the floor of the parliament – in order to lay out their plans directly to the people. It can happen in the very traditional forums provided by events such as party conventions, but it can equally happen in forums created specifically for the media opportunities they supply. For example, one of the most significant speeches of Tony Blair’s prime ministership was not made in the United Kingdom at all – but rather in Chicago. The great nineteenth-century orator and prime minister William Ewart Gladstone gave his most famous speeches not in the confines of the Palace of Westminster but rather in open-air meetings of his massed constituents in Midlothian in Scotland.

But more importantly, whether speeches are made in parliament or externally, the audience is now in large part undeniably the voting public. Prime ministers reach beyond the institutional constraints of the parliament to try and persuade voters. The purpose of their persuasion covers every aspect involved in the ‘selling’ of public policy choices. In an election context, they speak in order to rhetorically frame the overarching policy choices that their constituents face at an election. In a governance context, they try to create clear narratives for the signature policies of their government, or alternatively try to justify their intervention in policy areas that are normally out of scope. This can in particular take the form of federal intervention in state and provincial affairs in Australia and Canada. And in the individual context, prime ministers strive to define their own unique policy contribution that has fundamentally re-shaped their country – something that is usually done in the pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Frontmatter
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 The Mutual Delusion
• Chapter 2 Extra-Parliamentary Rhetorical Leadership: From Gladstone to Blair
• Chapter 3 The Rhetorical Prime Minister in Comparative Perspective
• Chapter 4 Persuading Voters: Cycles of Election-Defining Rhetoric
• Chapter 5 Prime Ministers and Policy Narratives
• Chapter 6 Policy Intervention in Sub-National Jurisdictions
• Chapter 7 Defining a Legacy
• Chapter 8 Prime Ministers and Mandarins: Rhetorical Consistency across Government
• Chapter 9 Conclusion: In Search of Authenticity
• Notes
• References
• Index