Multivocality and robust action dynamics in political discourse

How do politicians gain an upper hand in political discourse? Recent literature on framings in political discourse have re-directed attention from static models of issue ownership to more interactive models of strategic framing contests. This article proposes a robust action approach to the tactical horizon of political discourse dynamics, and tests hypotheses about the dual repertoires of local action: First, we test for the presence of exploratory local action, when discourse positions are altered in response to positions by others. Second, we show evidence for the presence of role claim behavior, when a multivocal dominant discourse position is taken, and suppresses participation from others. It is multivocality, rather the amount of speech that has a silencing effect. Using the case of economic policy discourse in Hungary in 1997, we show how the “GDP growth” discourse position silenced opposition positions on the right, mostly built from stigmatizing frames. Discourse positions beyond the one built around growth did not silence alternative framings, but elicited discourse shifts. We coded 8632 utterances over 100 days of discourse into a two-mode network of speech acts and statements and used a two-mode blockmodeling approach to identify positions and frames. We took a pooled time series approach to test hypotheses of local action dynamics. We found evidence for both exploratory local action and role claim, while controlling for observed and unobserved heterogeneity at the actor level.