Discourse and striving for power: an analysis of Barisan Nasional's 2004 Malaysian general election manifesto

Abstract

This study analyses the political party of Barisan Nasional's victory in the llth Malaysian general election 2004, looking at the way it manipulated and utilized language or discourse in order to retain and gain political power. Using a critical discourse analysis framework, this article holds that discourse is able to portray social practices, such as the striving for political power. This study also holds that political-power striving is a part of the organization's discourse management. The discourse chosen for this study is the Barisan Nasional's 2004 general election manifesto. The finding shows that the striving for political power by Barisan Nasional is manifested through textual features and discursive properties of discourse. The discursive properties are shown by certain processes in the production, distribution, consumption, force of utterances, and semiotic aspect of the discourse. The textual aspects of the discourse, on the other hand, are shown by certain features of grammar, vocabulary, and the generic structure tenet of the discourse.

Exploring political parties’ manifesto discourse on tourism: Analysis of Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish elections 1998–2011

“…I can therefore only assume that Chaney has also contributed to this manuscript, nonetheless I feel it would have been appropriate to acknowledge these other studies in this paper." The author(s) responded that "The present study is part of a wider policy literature examining manifesto discourse (Gould, 2000;Aman, 2009;Edwards, 2012) and comes from a programme of work that has examined the formative origins of different aspects of public policy in election programmes (Chaney, 2013a(Chaney, , 2013b(Chaney, , 2014". Personally, I would have liked to see a more substantial acknowledgement, in particular how these papers have, for instance, informed the methodology and analysis of this study.…”

“…The present study is part of a wider policy literature examining manifesto discourse (Gould, 2000;Aman, 2009;Edwards, 2012). It comes from a programme of work that has examined the formative origins of key aspects of public policy (for example, animal welfare, environmental policy and, foreign policy) in election programmes (Chaney, 2013a(Chaney, , 2013b(Chaney, , 2014.…”

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“…This clearly indicates a literature gap in Malaysian studies on language and nation building in general and CDA and nation building in particular which this study attempts to address. Aman (2009) employed Fairclough's (1992Fairclough's ( , 1995 three-dimensional Critical Discourse Analysis framework to show how Barisan Nasional's 2004 general election manifesto contributed to its striving for political power and victory. Particularly, it focuses on the textual features and discourse practice.…”

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“…The literature on CDA is informed by multifarious studies in diverse fields and contexts, ranging from politics (Fairclough 2001;Idris 2009;Abdul Latif 2016) to economy (Fairclough 2006;Akan 2011;Vaara 2014), education (Fairclough 1993), law (Wu, Huang and Zheng 2016), tourism (Stamou and Paraskevopoulos 2004), terrorism (Oddo 2011;Reyes 2011), health care (Dahl, Andrews and Clancy 2014; Fage-Butler 2015) and government policies (Teo 2007), among others. This is testament to how the CDA framework and methodology are highly amenable to studies with different purposes, audiences, contexts and cultures.…”