- Title
- Understanding political public relations techniques: an exploration of their value and function for political communication
- Creator
- Gayoso, Albina
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2019
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- Politicians and political leaders employ advisers skilled in the field of public relations to help them shape their messages. This has generated a phenomenon and a concomitant discipline that within predominantly Euro-American scholarship is known as political public relations (PPR). Within this disciplinary field scholars have studied what politicians do to build and maintain relationships and reputations in order to achieve their political goals. Such activities are captured by the concept of PPR. Yet the question of how PPR might be manifested within political speeches remains to be answered adequately. Even within the field of political science, where the exploration of how politicians communicate political messages is well-established, there are no satisfactory answers to this question. The thesis explored the question of how PPR techniques manifested themselves in political speeches by examining the ways in which political language, rhetoric and public relations intersected. The core aim of the study was to identify the particular techniques specific to PPR and to provide an explanation of how they worked. To do this, the thesis examined a set of institutionalised forms of political communication, namely the inauguration speeches of US and Russian presidents (and Soviet leaders) between 1981 and 2013. Including Russian inauguration speeches provided a comparative perspective, but it also revealed a need to cast the scholarship net a little wider. This was because within Russia there exists a scholarly field known as политические технологии (Political Technologies (PT)). Like PPR scholarship in the West it too was focused on understanding the same phenomenon, namely PPR and the techniques that make PPR possible. However, the two traditions were separated by geography and did not appear to have any significant cross-fertilisation. Euro-American scholarship appeared to be almost exclusively concerned with textual analysis, often to the neglect of nonverbal issues, whereas the Russian scholarship, while also equally concerned with text, paid more attention to the power dynamics involved. The thesis brought these two traditions together to create a common framework for analysis. Engaging with both traditions helped to focus the thesis on the PPR techniques that were manifested specifically in visual, audio and textual manipulations of communication and action. To achieve such a focus the thesis successfully developed a method for the complex analysis of non-verbal, emotional and textual clues that contributed to making PPR techniques. It brought together and combined considerations of text and discourse, voice tones, emotions as tagged to specific text, facial expressions and body language, and other factors concerned with the delivery of the speech. It applied this method to the inauguration speeches and their videos to identify their respective PPR techniques. Once these PPR techniques were identified attention turned to explaining how they were used in each particular speech and set of speeches per country. On that basis it was possible to then explore how these techniques varied, if at all, in terms of national differences and in terms of the differences between each speech occasion for each successive president in both countries. The thesis was not concerned with measuring the success or failure of either the speeches or of their respective techniques. Rather the focus was on developing an understanding of how particular PPR techniques shaped the political messages of these inauguration speeches. It was found that the PPR techniques did not exist in isolation, but in relationships. When these relationships were mapped it emerged that PPR techniques could be organised in three levels according to the complexity of behaviours, practices, displays, and discourses. Most common were the fundamental techniques that the thesis termed micro techniques. Micro techniques were most heavily influenced by factors such as time, circumstances, audiences, purposes, speakers, and cultures. Above them were the macro techniques. The macro techniques resulted from various combinations of micro techniques and both types could be combined to form meta techniques. Meta techniques sat at the top of the PPR hierarchy. In general, PPR techniques at the micro and the macro levels varied from country to country and from leader to leader. However, the meta techniques exhibited more similarities than differences between countries and the leaders’ specific agendas during inaugurations, though the way they were implemented “on the ground” directly depended on the political environment, audience and speaker. On the basis of the speeches studied in this thesis, it can be suggested that the inauguration ceremony itself becomes a PPR technique. This thesis has identified and named a number of key PPR techniques. It has shown how they operated and how they contributed to shaping the political discourse of this time-slice of inauguration speeches. It also demonstrated that the political speeches of presidential leaders relied on more than just well-honed rhetoric, though that remained necessary. Central to the organisational coherence of these speeches was the importance of well-placed PPR techniques. In so doing the thesis has provided a more adequate understanding of PPR techniques than has hitherto existed.
- Subject
- political public relations; political communication; political psychology; non-verbal communication; Russia; USA
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1412519
- Identifier
- uon:36493
- Rights
- Copyright 2019 Albina Gayoso
- Language
- eng
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Thesis | 16 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Abstract | 557 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |