Language, Gender and Floor Apportionment in Political Debates

Abstract

Political debates are speech events which foreground issues of power and the `floor', and allow the opportunity of assessing the ways in which the gender of participants affects their construction as more or less powerful participants in debates. Debates in the British House of Commons are adversarial in style, making it appropriate to view the floor as `the site of a contest where there is a winner and a loser'. Previous research into political debates has found that male participants violate the formal rules in debates more than their female counterparts, in order to gain the floor. Although the canonical form and rules of debates exist to `permit the equalization of turns', rule violations are common, and inequalities between participants exist. In this article legal and illegal interventions are evaluated in five debates in order to establish the extent to which the gender of participants is related to the control that an individual has over the debate floor.

An Ethnographic Investigation into Gender and Language in the Northern Ireland Assembly

“…This notion of a 'competitive economy' seems particularly apt for the highly regulated debate floor where turns are sought for professional and political gain. This method has been successfully used to identify a model of turn-taking in relation to the participation of MPs in debates in the House of Commons [16] and provides a useful framework for comparisons across the assemblies.…”

“…As she starts to criticise the DUP member she makes a tapping motion above the desk, this is then replaced by shaking her head when she directly criticises the DUP member for sniggering (line 8), and then she points upwards and beats her finger in the air as she says 'if people are really concerned' (lines [9][10][11][12]. At this point she is illegally barracked from the floor (line 11), and the Deputy Speaker intervenes to restore order (lines [13][14][15][16]. The Minister chooses not to ignore the 'sniggering' from the sedentary opposing MLA, but rather attempts to tackle the criticism directly by 'naming' the perpetrator so that his behaviour is recorded in the official report of the proceedings 8 .…”

“…It has been claimed that the devolved parliaments of the UK offer women greater opportunities to participate than older, traditional parliaments because they have included women from the beginning and because they are constructed with egalitarian and inclusive aims. Previous sociolinguistic research on House of Commons debates has found that although women participate equally with men in terms of the formal or 'legal' debate rules, they do not participate equally in terms of illegal debate discourse (by contributing 'out of turn', for example) [1][2]. The reasons for this are likely to be complex, and related in part to the 'visibility' of women in a traditionally male-dominated forum [3] and the nature of traditional parliaments as a 'linguistic habitus' [4] in which 'silence or hypercontrolled language' is imposed on some people, while others are allowed the 'liberties of a language that is securely established' [5].…”

“…Introduction particular woman politician (the Minister of Education) 1 is perceived by interviewees to be the most unpopular speaker in the debating chamber. Interview data from politicians and from the Minister is analysed to try and find out the reasons for this unpopularity.…”

Casting the ‘Other’: Gender Citizenship in Politicians’ Narratives

“…These analyses have emphasized the constitutive nature of language in both the conservative and transformative senses (Wodak, 1996); they have furnished empirical examples of the discursive construction of gender identity (Sunderland and Litosseliti, 2002;Holmes and Meyerhoff, 2003); they have highlighted how gender is socially constructed through discourse (Wodak, 1997;Weatherall, 2002); they have shown the power relations connected to, and reproduced by, such discourse (Wodak, 1997;Walsh, 2001;Thornborrow, 2002); and they have advocated a recasting of traditional approaches (Bergvall, Bing and Freed 1996) so that they assume a critical and deconstructionist perspective which supersedes the dichotomous view. Various authors have concentrated in particular on the relationship among discourse, gender and political representation, focusing on parliamentary discourse and on the construct of 'politeness' (Shaw 2000, Christie 2002, and on the mediatized representation and construction of the gender identities of women in politics (Walsh, 1998;2001). This article shares many of the basic assumptions of this body of literature, and it seeks to respond to some of the stimuli arising from the debate by conducting a narrative analysis of stories of women and men in politics.…”