How did you come to choose your research topic?
As many who have gone through the PhD process might tell you, the final dissertation rarely resembles the idea proposed when entering the PhD programme. In my case, this dissertation started as a reflection on meaning and function in political language. More specifically, it originally proposed to investigate why, for example, electorates in multicultural democracies appear to “like” politicians who “break” with political correctness. Yet, this idea barely made it to the final dissertation – though it became a separate short article. Instead, the dissertation evolved to focus on three aspects of everyday “doing politics” via discourse that are often sidelined in the political science literature for being deemed ambiguous or hard to measure: authenticity, problem-construction, and urgency.
What did you hope to achieve by studying these sidelined aspects?
The dissertation switches the lens through which we understand politicians’ and voters’ behaviour from specific interpretations of meaning in political discourses to discursive processes that help politicians bond with electorates. By shifting the focus from discursive content to processes, I hoped to better comprehend why certain perceived personality traits of politicians appear so important to electorates. I also examined how political problems are constructed in discourse depending on where and to whom politicians speak, with the aim of identifying overlapping and incoherent policies directed at complex objects of policy such as the Amazon rainforest. Finally, I analysed the urgency in which politicians speak about their priorities in the hope to can collect important information about what they plan to pursue first or with most commitment. Answering these questions required moving beyond common, off-the-shelf explanations for why political discourses matter (e.g., the ideology of politicians and/or electorates) and thinking theoretically, methodologically, and empirically about how everyday politics are done.
Can you describe the three articles that make up your PhD dissertation?
The three articles, each with their own question and approach, speak across disciplines to offer different ways to identify and measure authenticity, problem-construction, and urgency in political texts.
The first article, Radiating Truthiness: Authenticity Performances in Politics in Brazil and the United States, conceptualises authenticity performances in politics. Political authenticity, as the perceived degree to which politicians appear to remain true to themselves, is connected to higher levels of political trust from electorates and is essential for a candidate’s success. Yet, authenticity is frequently overlooked as a determining factor in electoral behaviour for being deemed vague and contradictory as a concept. To date, discussions of how, when, and where authenticity appears and changes in politics usually remain at the theoretical level and are rarely comparative. The article develops a framework to identify and compare how authenticity has been performed in politics over time and across settings by politicians. To demonstrate the usefulness of the framework, it investigates authenticity performances in 21,496 political texts of electoral debates, interviews, campaigns, and official speeches by presidents and presidential candidates in Brazil and the US since 1988. Findings suggest that authenticity is generally performed with greater frequency by presidents and presidential candidates in Brazil than in the US, though authenticity performances are not more prevalent during election years in either country. Moreover, presidential candidates in the US perform authenticity more frequently than sitting presidents – to attract national attention and secure party nominations – whereas, in Brazil, authenticity is not performed at significantly different rates by elected presidents or presidential candidates. In both countries, however, presidents in office focus on performing only the authenticities that work best for them, while candidates are more diverse in how they perform authenticity.
The second article, Which Amazon Problem? Problem-Constructions and Transnationalism in Brazilian Presidential Discourse since 1985 (co-authored with Livio Silva-Muller), investigates how the Brazilian Amazon is constructed as a problem in presidential discourses. The Amazon is a complex object of policy that comprises environmental, economic, social, and sovereignty concerns. Despite this complexity, governments are often portrayed as having a single understanding of the region as a political problem. The article develops a framework that accounts for how important transnational actors, such as presidents, construct objects of policy as particular problems depending on where and when they participate in politics. It examines how the Amazon has been constructed as a problem in 6240 Brazilian presidential speeches since 1985 using supervised machine learning. Findings illustrate how Brazilian presidents construct the Amazon as an issue of environmental conservation when speaking far away from the Amazon region. Within the Amazonian region, they usually construct the Amazon as an issue of social development and economic integration. Though, when deforestation increases, presidents tend to side-step the issue and generally construct the Amazon as an issue of economic integration. Moreover, in recent years, presidents are increasingly more likely to mix problem-constructions and construct the Amazon as a complex and multifaceted object of policy. The article highlights the extent to which different Amazonian constructions are ignored or privileged in transnational politics and how we must stop assuming that the Amazon is understood just as an environmental issue.
The third article, How Urgently Do Leaders Speak about Climate Change? Urgency Analysis of Political Priorities (co-authored with Jael Tan and James Hollway), introduces urgency analysis, a new methodology for text analysis. When speaking to their electorates and canvassing support, politicians employ various terms to signal the urgency of different problems and the priority of specific policies. Urgency in political discourses refers to how necessary and/or how soon an action should be undertaken as a response to a political problem. The article develops urgency analysis, a set of text analytic tools to capture the expressed urgency of political priorities in discourse. Urgency analysis combines natural language processing and survey-validated dictionaries to provide an interpretable measure of the urgency of priorities in political texts. This allows to compare how urgent a certain problem is for politicians and where it lies in their list of priorities. To demonstrate what urgency analysis offers compared to other text analytical methods, the article collects data on US presidential and UK prime ministerial political speeches on climate change between 2007 and 2020. Findings demonstrate how the urgency with which leaders in the UK speak of climate change priorities is consistently higher than that used by leaders in the US. However, the urgency of climate change priorities appears more responsive to short-term political demands rather than long-term needs in both countries. Even as average temperatures rise, climate change is not framed as a more urgent priority in the US or the UK over time.
Altogether, the broader contributions of this dissertation to studies of political discourses are threefold. First, it contributes to further the understanding of how politicians relate to electorates when speaking to them beyond specific interpretations of meanings from political discourse. This is a small step in the direction of grasping the many ways in which political discourses could matter for electoral outcomes. Second, the dissertation adopts a flexible understanding of political discourses as “doing politics” that allows scholars to systematically investigate patterns related to how, where, and when certain types of discourses appear and change in politics – even if they occur unintentionally or depend on audiences’ interpretation. Finally, the dissertation shows how politicians construct political issues and respond to demands from audiences by employing different types of discourse across spaces while, at the same time, adapting over time as needed. They can, for example, side-step problems depending on where and to whom they speak, while relying on different settings or audiences to bring issues to the political agenda. These findings advance our knowledge of how politicians interact with diverse audiences via discourse in sometimes unexpected ways.
What could be the social and political implications of your thesis?
Overall, this dissertation provides theoretical frameworks, empirical examples, and methodological tools for the study of authenticity, problem-construction, and urgency in political discourses. Accounting for them can strengthen our ability to analyse complex political dynamics as how politicians relate to electorates via discourses. The frameworks and methods developed in the dissertation allow other scholars to incorporate these aspects in their research, taking them as potential explanations for why and how political discourse matters. Political scientists have begun to understand how valence factors beyond policies influence electoral choices. This implies that electorates might vote for politicians regardless of – or even despite – what is being said or the policies proposed. Authenticity, problem-construction, and urgency offer fruitful alternatives to understand what certain political discourses are, how they change over time, and why they might be important for democratic politics. Better accounting for the role of these aspects of “doing politics” can be helpful in grasping, for example, why elected politicians frequently do not appear to be representative of their own electorates.
What are you doing now?
Shortly after defending my PhD, I started as a postdoctoral researcher in environmental governance and global development at the Wyss Academy for Nature at the University of Bern. I am excited about this opportunity and about the future.
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Henrique Sposito defended his PhD thesis in International Relations/Political Science, “On Doing Politics: Authenticity, Problem-Construction, and Urgency in Political Discourse”, on 18 October 2024. Associate Professor Graziella Moraes Dias Da Silva presided over the committee, which included Associate Professor James Hollway, Thesis Co-Supervisor; Yanina Welp, Research Fellow at the Albert Hirschmann Centre on Democracy, Thesis Co-Supervisor; and, as External Reader, Professor Ernesto Calvo, Government and Politics, University of Maryland, USA.
Citation of the PhD thesis:
Sposito, Henrique. “On Doing Politics: Authenticity, Problem-Construction, and Urgency in Political Discourse.” Geneva Graduate Institute, 2024.
How to find the thesis:
Two of the three papers that make up this dissertation have been published and are openly available:
- Henrique Sposito, “Radiating Truthiness: Authenticity Performances in Politics in Brazil and the United States”, Political Studies (2024): 1–25, https://doi.org/10.1177/00323217241261229
- Livio Silva-Muller and Henrique Sposito, “Which Amazon Problem? Problem-Constructions and Transnationalism in Brazilian Presidential Discourse since 1985”, Environmental Politics 33, no. 3 (2024): 398–421, https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2023.2220639
If you are part of the Graduate Institute’s community, you can also access the complete dissertation through the institutional repository here.
Banner image: Shutterstock/casa.da.photo.
Interview by Nathalie Tanner, Research Office.