The rhetoric of self-preservation: Brexit and blame avoidance

What rhetorical strategies do Brexiteers adopt to defend their position? Sten Hansson (University of Tartu) looks at five ways that Theresa May, David Davis, Boris Johnson and Liam Fox have sought to deflect criticism of Brexit, and concludes that they risk damaging democratic debate

The six types of harmful information that make us more vulnerable during the pandemic

Fake remedies, misleading advice, false medical information: the creation, transmission, and consumption of false information have proliferated during the pandemic. Sten Hansson (University of Birmingham/University of Tartu) describes the six types of harmful exposure that make people more vulnerable. Most people are able to recognise and ignore false claims about COVID-19. Nonetheless, as we know ... Continue

Untruthful Brexit rhetoric has undermined representative democracy in the UK

Throughout the run-up to the signing of the EU-UK withdrawal agreement as well as the trade deal, the British government’s public rhetoric on Brexit has been criticised for being misleading and insincere. Sten Hansson (University of Tartu/University of Birmingham) and Sandra Kröger (University of Exeter) argue that there are four ways in which untruthful statements by leading politicians may have undermined representative democracy

Dialogic analysis of government social media communication: How commanding and thanking elicit blame

During major crises, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, government officeholders issue commands to change people’s behaviour (e.g., ‘Stay at home!’) and express thanks to acknowledge the efforts of others and build solidarity. We use specialised datasets of replies to social media posts by government ministers in the United Kingdom during Covid-19 lockdowns to explore how people react to their messages that contain directive speech acts and thanking. Empirically, our corpus-assisted analysis of evaluative language and blaming shows that far from promoting team spirit, thanking may elicit at least as much, if not more blaming language than commands. Methodologically, we demonstrate how to analyse government social media communication dialogically to gain more nuanced insights about online feedback from citizens

HOW RUSSIA DEFLECTS ACCUSATIONS OF CYBERATTACKS AND DISINFORMATION CAMPAIGNS: AN ANALYSIS OF THE RHETORICAL STRATEGIES OF RT

The government of the Russian Federation is using cyberattacks and information operations against other countries for geopolitical purposes1 . Despite being criticised by international communities, Russia deflects all accusations by justifying its behaviour. To better understand the strategic communication of Russia we analysed the ways in which the largest Russian state-funded international news portal RT.com portrays accusations of cyber- and disinformation attacks. According to our analysis, the articles in RT deflect blame from Russia primarily in four ways: (1) accusations are described as groundless and evidence non-existent; (2) accusers are portrayed as malignant and Russia as the victim; (3) accusers are portrayed as unreliable or ridiculous; and (4) the audience is distracted or made to question the accusations

Blame avoidance in government communication

Governments’ policies and actions often precipitate public blame firestorms and mediated scandals targeted at individual or collective policy makers. In the face of losing credibility and resources, officeholders are tempted to apply strategies of blame avoidance which permeate administrative structures, operations, and language use. Linguistic aspects of blame avoidance are yet to be studied by discourse analysts in great detail. It is necessary to develop a more sophisticated, context-sensitive understanding of how blame avoidance affects public communication practices of governments, because certain defensive ways of communicating may curb democratic deliberation in society. In this thesis, I propose a systematic approach to identifying and interpreting defensive discursive strategies adopted by government communicators in the circumstances of blame risk. I do this by engaging with a set of recent empirical data (samples of text, talk, and images produced by the British government at critical moments in the aftermath of the financial crisis of the late 2000s; field data from the backstage of British government communication), and integrating political science literature on the politics of blame avoidance with the linguistically rooted discourse-historical approach to the study of social problems. I show how reactive and anticipative blame avoidance in government communication involves the use of particular strategies of arguing, framing, denying, representing social actors and actions, legitimating, and discursive manipulation. I argue that officeholders’ discursive practices of blame avoidance should be interpreted in relation to various conceptualisations of ‘government communication’, understood within the frames of a discursively constructed ‘blame game’, and analysed as multimodal defensive performances. This is a multidisciplinary exploratory study that I hope will open up new avenues for future research into government blame games, and, more broadly, into blame phenomena in political and organisational life

Strategies of Blaming on Social Media: An Experimental Study of Linguistic Framing and Retweetability

This article introduces an original theoretical model for understanding how the linguistic framing of political protest messages influences how blame spreads in social media. Our model of blame retweetability posits that the way in which the basis and focus of blame are linguistically construed affects people’s perception of the strength of criticism in the message and its likelihood to be reposted. Two online experiments provide empirical support for the model. We find that attacks on a person’s character are perceived as more critical than blaming focused on the negative outcomes of their actions, and that negative judgements of social sanction have a greater impact than those of social esteem. The study also uncovers a “retweetability paradox” – in contrast to earlier studies, we find that blame messages that are perceived as more critical are not more likely to be reposted

Linking resilience, vulnerability, social capital and risk awareness for crisis and disaster research

Crisis and disaster research has extensively contributed to theoretical, conceptual, methodological and empirical advances in the understanding of resilience, vulnerability, social capital and risk awareness. These concepts identify complex social phenomena, which are intensified, in both positive and negative terms, by crises and disasters. However, the accumulation of knowledge about these notions has produced a vast range of definitions, which affects the way they are used in the study of crises and disasters. This paper sets a research agenda, by promoting a conceptual model to help simplify and make more researchable these complex concepts. This model stems from a triangulation of methods, with the goal of providing more researchable definitions of these notions and of illustrating linkages among them, seldom addressed in the way this model suggests, in the context of the crisis management cycle.publishedVersio

Approaches to ‘vulnerability’ in eight European disaster management systems

Orru, K., Hansson, S., Gabel, F., Tammpuu, P., Krüger, M., Savadori, L., Meyer, S.F., Torpan, S., Jukarainen, P., Schieffelers, A., Lovasz, G. and Rhinard, M. (2022), Approaches to ‘vulnerability’ in eight European disaster management systems. Disasters, 46: 742-767. https://doi.org/10.1111/disa.12481While social vulnerability in the face of disasters has received increasing academic attention, relatively little is known about the extent to which that knowledge is reflected in practice by institutions involved in disaster management. In this study, we chart the practitioners’ approaches to disaster vulnerability in eight European countries: Germany, Italy, Belgium, Hungary, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Estonia. The study draws from a comparative document analysis and 95 interviews with disaster managers and reveals significant differences across countries in terms of the ontology of vulnerability, its sources, reduction strategies, and the allocation of related duties. To advance the debate and provide conceptual clarity, we put forward a model for explicating different understandings of vulnerability along the dimensions of human agency and technological structures as well as social support through private relations and state actors.acceptedVersio