Political etiquette

Abstract

Social norms forbidding rape jokes, blackface, and flag-burning exemplify a peculiar form of etiquette, which I call political etiquette. Just as compliance with ordinary etiquette expresses respect for the other individuals involved in a social encounter, compliance with political etiquette expresses respect for social groups. In this paper, I propose that we understand political etiquette as a system of conventions whereby we indicate our commitment to treating vulnerable social groups in accordance with their rightful status. Because we have a standing obligation to assure all members of our community that their rightful social status will be respected, we have a powerful moral reason to conform with all existing political etiquette norms whose target social groups lack such assurance, even when compliance with these norms is not antecedently morally valuable. Alongside our moral reasons to comply with some existing political etiquette norms, we also have moral reasons to fortify good political etiquette norms and to reform or erode bad ones.

Populism à la Carte: The paradoxical political communication of Narendra Modi on Twitter

“…We will see how this abidance to an expected political etiquette sits uneasy with his overall populist image. Because political etiquette is normative (Sadovsky, 2020), nontransgressive and removed from popular praxis, it cannot be easily labelled as populist. This is reflective of Modi's attitude on Twitter as a 'normal' executive head devoid of individual appeal of its own.…”