Hofstetter Stokoe 2018 Doing politics chapter.pdf (345.17 kB)
Making ‘politics’ relevant: How constituents and a Member of Parliament raise political topics at constituency surgeries
chapter
posted on 2018-08-14, 11:30 authored by Emily Hofstetter, Elizabeth StokoeThis paper investigates an area of political discourse that has hitherto existed in an analytic ‘black box’: the constituency office. We focus on the interactions between ordinary British people as they engage directly in ‘political’ discussions with their Member of Parliament. While the majority of surgery talk surrounds complaints about services, we focus on sequences of talk in which either citizens or the MP make ‘political’ topics relevant. Eighty consultations were video-recorded, anonymized and transcribed, and the data analysed using conversation analysis. We found that MP-initiated political comments portray the government as aligned with constituents’ needs, whereas constituents use political comments largely to criticize the government. Constituents privilege the interactional contingencies over other issues. Overall, the paper contributes to our understanding of how constituents navigate interactional and political contingencies in interactions with their representative.
History
School
- Social Sciences
Department
- Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies
Published in
Doing politics: Discursivity, performativity and mediation in political discourse.Pages
000 - 000Citation
HOFSTETTER, E. and STOKOE, E., 2018. Making ‘politics’ relevant: How constituents and a Member of Parliament raise political topics at constituency surgeries. IN: Horan, G. & Kranert, M. (eds.) Doing politics: Discursivity, performativity and mediation in political discourse. Amsterdam, The Netherlands, John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp. 127-150.Publisher
© John Benjamins PublishingVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publication date
2018Notes
This paper is under copyright and that the publisher should be contacted for permission to re-use or reprint the material in any form.ISBN
9789027201935Publisher version
Language
- en