Argument kinds and argument roles in the Ontario provincial election, 2011

Abstract

This paper is a report of a pilot study of how candidates argue when they are running for political office. The election studied was the provincial election in Ontario, Canada, in the fall of 2011. Having collected about 250 arguments given during the election from newspaper media, we sought answers to the following questions, among others: (i) which argumentation schemes have the greatest currency in political elections? (ii) Is a list of the best known argumentation schemes sufficient to classify the arguments given in elections? (iii) What schemes should be added to the familiar list to make it more adequate for studying elections? (iv) Is it useful to classify arguments as being used for positive, policy-critical, person-critical and defensive purposes? (v) Can political parties be usefully characterized by noting their preferred kinds of arguments and their most frequent uses of arguments? (vi) What lessons can be learned from this study to better design future studies of the same kind?

A classification system for argumentation schemes

“…The other was called the argument from misplaced priorities, identified in cases where one party accused the other of basing its position or argument on a set of priorities that is the reverse of the proper ordering of these priorities. These findings can be found in Hansen and Walton (2013).…”

“…Some work was reported by Hansen and Walton (2013) on problem cases where inter-coder reliability was low, but at the present time we do not have the resources to continue this empirical work, although we are hoping that others will do it. Walton (2012) provided refinements of the rubrics on which the coding was based by providing a set of identity requirements for each scheme.…”

“…This work, in turn, suggested the possibility that schemes could also be used to search through databases containing everyday conversational argumentation of the kind found on the Internet, for example (Walton, 2011). Hansen and Walton (2013) took first steps to use schemes to identify types of arguments used in an election campaign. The possibility of developing computational tools that could be used for this purpose was very exciting for argumentation theory itself, as an interdisciplinary subject, because it suggested that, instead of having to identify these arguments in a corpus by using coders that need to have three or four years of training in argumentation before they are skilled enough to be able to pick out examples of each type of argument, we could carry out this kind of data collection as an automated procedure.…”

“…In a recent study of argumentation schemes in political argumentation, Hansen and Walton (2013) used schemes to classify kinds of arguments put forward by candidates in a provincial election in Ontario. One aim of the study was to find out which kinds of arguments are most commonly used in election campaigns by finding arguments matching a given list of schemes and trying to identify any new kinds of arguments not found on this list.…”

Arguments from Fairness and Misplaced Priorities in Political Argumentation

“…A secondary question we considered was whether some kinds of arguments were used more frequently than others in general and by some political parties in particular. The findings can be found in (Hansen & Walton, 2013).…”