Navigating coercion in political rhetoric: shifting strategies to cope with intervention by the Troika in Portugal

Abstract

This article examines how government actors of a nation-state cope with coercion exerted on them by an external source and how they evolve justifications and persuasive arguments when debating and reporting new policies in a setting that threatens to compromise national sovereignty and integrity. We approach the question by analysing two diverse political arenas: parliamentary debates and public accounts by political leaders in the media during the intervention by the Troika in Portugal. The study evidences a variation in strategies to manage coercion: the politicians use both depoliticization and relativization. While discourses of depoliticization are frequent in media, in parliamentary debates the predominant strategy is to emphasize the aspect of agency by relativizing the power of the Troika. Both strategies serve to portray responsibility in the face of external intervention, but in different discursive environments political actors use different rhetorical tools to work on their institutional appearance and legitimacy.

Does the MTEF shape annual budgets in a developing country?

“…He argued that talks and decisions compensate for inconsistent actions and that actions compensate for inconsistent talks and decisions. For example, Pi Ferrer and Rautajoki (2020) argue that politicians change the content of what they say, and act out different roles of responsibility for a different set of primary recipients. Perez and Robson (1999) argued that the introduction of budget participation revealed the role of formal budget participation as a ritual of control and legitimation without the substantive involvement of middle managers.…”