Chapter 4. Analyzing political discourse: Method, implementation and data

The aim of this chapter is to clarify the method and approach used in this work to show which governmental discourses might dominate the political sphere in the form of hegemonic projects and how they are operationalized. This aim can be realized with the help of contemporary ideas on political discourse analysis. As Reisigl (2008) points out, classical rhetorical genre theory distinguishes three forms of oratory – judicial, deliberative and epideictic. Setting judicial oratory aside to focus on discourse in politics, the deliberative genre relates to differing views about political decisions in the ancient public sphere and the epideictic genre focuses on the verbalization of political values and consent. But this distinction is insufficient to understand the current dynamics of political texts. The classical genre-theoretical framework is still relevant to determine whether political speeches belong to the deliberative or epideictic genres. This distinction helps to determine the function of a political speech. But a transdisciplinary politico-linguistic approach is still needed to combine rhetoric, political science and discourse analysis for a more comprehensive analysis.