Sylvia Shaw

A Different Voice

This chapter sets out the questions to be addressed in the book as a whole. It introduces the notion of women’s ‘different voice’ as both a linguistic and a sociopolitical construct, and reviews research dealing with gender as an influence on verbal behaviour in political and other public or institutional settings. It then outlines the context and main events of the 2015 General Election campaign in the UK, including the two televised leaders’ debates which are at the centre of this book’s case study of female political leaders’ speech. The chapter ends with a brief account of the case study approach, and summarizes the aims and methods of the present study.

Celebrity capital in the political field: Russell Brand’s migration from stand-up comedy to Newsnight

Our case study of charismatic celebrity comedian Russell Brand’s turn to political activism uses Bourdieu’s field theory to understand the process of celebrity migration across social fields. We investigate how Brand’s capital as a celebrity performer, storyteller and self-publicist translated from comedy to politics. To judge how this worked in practice, we analysed the comedic strategies used in his stand-up show Messiah Complex and undertook a conversational analysis of his notorious interview with Jeremy Paxman on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)’s flagship current affairs programme Newsnight. We argue that Brand was able to secure political legitimacy by creatively constituting himself as an authentic anti-austerity spokesperson for the disenfranchised left in United Kingdom. In order to do so, he repurposed his celebrity capital to political ends and successfully deployed the cultural and social capitals he had developed as a celebrity comedian to secure widespread engagement with his media performances.

Gender and Speech Styles in the 2015 General Election Debates

This chapter presents an analysis of the linguistic behaviour of the party leaders who took part in the two televised debates that were central events in the GE2015 campaign. We consider the distribution of speaking turns and speaking time among participants, and examine the use they made of adversarial and cooperative/supportive strategies. The analysis shows that all participants employed a variety of strategies, though the range and balance was different for each individual. These individual differences were seen within as well as between gender groups: overall, gender appeared to be a less significant influence on leaders’ performances than the relative status of their parties and the extent of their political and public speaking experience.

Reception and Representation

This chapter examines the representation of the three female party leaders in a sample of election coverage taken from UK national newspapers. The analysis identifies a number of key themes in this coverage—noting that both gender and gendered styles of speaking were among press commentators’ preoccupations—and discusses some of the rhetorical and linguistic devices that recurred in commentary on the women. While the personalized, trivializing, and stereotypical representations found by other researchers were a salient feature of the press discourse sampled, there was also a clear trend towards positive representations of women’s performances in the debates, which can be related to the ‘different voice’ ideology of gender, language, and politics.

Democracy in Practice: Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament

ual chapter titles: ‘limited political interest’; ‘still looking for a new era’; ‘a missed opportunity’; ‘slow adaptation’; ‘hesitant steps’; ‘a watchdog that does not bark’; ‘a modest actor’; ‘a passive player’; ‘the dog that rarely barks’; ‘a slow awakening’; ‘in need of a wake-up call’. Indeed, with a few exceptions (the Danish Folketing being much to the fore), the national parliamentary response has been strangely muted. True, as Christine Neuhold and Julie Smith point out in their concluding chapter, some parliaments are still on a learning curve. Nevertheless, the differentiated picture this study reveals bodes ill for the coherent approach required if national parliaments are to exercise the collective powers (‘yellow’ and ‘red’ cards) the Lisbon Treaty granted them, and the muted role many of them play with regard to EU legislation and policymaking will not reassure those who feel that the European Parliament alone cannot provide all the answers. OPAL, the editors and the contributors have not only produced an authoritative work of reference; they have thrown into relief another aspect of the democratic challenge the steadily-integrating EU faces.