Analyzing Presidential Debates

Abstract

One of the most used theories in the research of political debates is the functional theory of campaign discourse. However, the theory has been criticized for being too culturally limited. In the present article, a Finnish presidential debate is analyzed from the perspective of functional theory. The goal is to critically evaluate the applicability of functional theory to the analysis of Finnish political campaigning. The results show that a Finnish presidential debate differs in many ways from an American presidential debate. The study shows how strongly the culture is reflected in political television debates and how important it is to take account of the cultural perspective in the development of a theory.

A Functional Analysis of the Finnish 2012 Presidential Elections

“…Cmeciu and Patrut (2010) agreed with this critique, arguing that political campaign discourse is not consistent across borders and cultures; indeed, their study of the 2009 Romanian presidential debates revealed the debates were not focused on acclaims and policy, as argued by the functional theory, but instead on attacks and defences. Also Hrbková and Zagrapan's (2014) research of the 2012 election debates in Slovakia reached similar conclusions, arguing the categories of content analysis should be expanded as with the current categories more than 30 percent of the content of the debates would be excluded from the analysis -an argument also made by Isotalus (2011). Nevertheless, from the content analysed, acclaims were still the most common category, followed by attacks, which means the results reached in Slovakia are at least somewhat similar to those reached in the United States.…”

“…In recent years, however, the functional theory of political campaign discourse has been applied to several elections in various countries outside of the US. So far, functional theory has been used to analyse political campaign discourse in Slovakia (Hrbková & Zagrapan, 2014), the United Kingdom (Benoit & Benoit-Bryan, 2013), France (Choi & Benoit, 2013), Spain (Herrero & Benoit, 2009), Israel (Benoit & Sheafer, 2006), Taiwan (Benoit, Wen, & Yu, 2007), Romania (Cmeciu & Patrut, 2010), Ukraine (Benoit & Klyukovski, 2006), Germany (Benoit & Hemmer, 2007), Korea (Lee & Benoit, 2004, 2005, Finland (Isotalus 2010(Isotalus , 2011, Canada (Benoit, 2011;Benoit & Henson, 2007), and Australia (Benoit & Henson, 2007). Applying functional theory to research the political campaign discourse in countries other than the US has raised the question of whether the theory is too culturally limited to be useful in political systems different from that of the US.…”

“…Applying functional theory to research the political campaign discourse in countries other than the US has raised the question of whether the theory is too culturally limited to be useful in political systems different from that of the US. Critique towards the functional theory has been brought forward by Isotalus (2010Isotalus ( , 2011 who claims, first, the theory was developed to be used in a two-party system and is therefore difficult to apply to a multi-party system, second, the functional theory only works in elections where the character of the candidate is important (Isotalus & Aarnio, 2005in Isotalus, 2011 and third, some forms of political discourse are culturally bound and therefore the division to attacks, acclaims and defences is not flexible enough to analyse political campaign debates in all cultures. Cmeciu and Patrut (2010) agreed with this critique, arguing that political campaign discourse is not consistent across borders and cultures; indeed, their study of the 2009 Romanian presidential debates revealed the debates were not focused on acclaims and policy, as argued by the functional theory, but instead on attacks and defences.…”

“…Functional Theory makes a series of assumptions and predictions on the utterances performed by candidates in their campaign discourse and has been used to analyse presidential debates in the United States (Benoit, 2014b), among other forms of campaign messages, which include television spots, direct mail advertising and talk show appearances. The theory has also been applied to presidential elections in other countries with mixed results: most studies seem to indicate presidential campaign discourse is the same across borders and cultures, yet a few studies (e.g., Cmeciu & Patrut, 2010;Hrbková & Zagrapan, 2014;Isotalus, 2011) have offered criticism of the theory, claiming it to be too culturally limited to be useful in cultures different from the United States. Isotalus (2011) applied the functional theory to Finnish elections, analysing the 2006 presidential elections in Finland.…”

“…The theory has also been applied to presidential elections in other countries with mixed results: most studies seem to indicate presidential campaign discourse is the same across borders and cultures, yet a few studies (e.g., Cmeciu & Patrut, 2010;Hrbková & Zagrapan, 2014;Isotalus, 2011) have offered criticism of the theory, claiming it to be too culturally limited to be useful in cultures different from the United States. Isotalus (2011) applied the functional theory to Finnish elections, analysing the 2006 presidential elections in Finland. He criticized the theory for not being applicable in multi-party systems and for not being suitable for analysing political campaign discourse in Finland, as the Finnish speech culture differs greatly from the American speech culture.…”