The Importance Of Political Discourse

Political discourse is the result of a social construction. It constructs the social world it aims to reflect. The reality of the world isn’t showed through PD. Indeed, political discourse appears to be a reality in itself.
Through political discourse, power relations will be established according to the weight granted to a type of discourse, and to the speaker who is legitimate to speak politics. In this sense, “political discourse” generally refers to politicians only.
These power relations are expressed through diverse discursive processes, which maintain the legitimacy of the speaker. They are the result of a relation of interdependence between language and action. An act of language follows a principle of alterity (Charaudeau: 2014, 12).

Values arise from a social construction, they are “shared mental objects of social cognition” (Van Dijk, 1998: 74). A politician must be able to defend the values he promotes, and they must have a meaning within the discourse. If George W. Bush and Barack Obama have promoted the value of “freedom”, this value will adopt a certain meaning in a certain context. Martin and Wodak wrote that “interpreting what happened involves social values […]” (2003: 9). The attacks of 9/11 have been interpreted has an attack on “freedom”, on the American “freedom”. Terrorism itself is defined as a threat to “freedom”. From the interpretation of values within a political discourse, an ideology will emerge. “It is the specific, group-related and interest-defined, interpretation of values that forms the building blocks of ideological beliefs” (Van Dijk, 2000: 14). And ideologies “are based on a selection and combination of values drawn from a cultural common ground” (Van Dijk, 1998:

As explained by Guillemi (quoted in Charaudeau, 2014: 151), the role of these representations is to interpret the reality that surrounds us, and to symbolise it with specific meanings. They form the set of beliefs, knowledge, and opinions that are produced and shared by individuals belonging to a same community. Through discourses, they shape our world views and the way we judge the world with values. This process typically generates knowledge that will be set up in systems of thoughts. However, two types of knowledge are to be distinguished: “savoirs de connaissance”, that we will translate as “scientific knowledge”, and “savoirs de croyances”, that we will understand as “beliefs” (Charaudeau, 2014: 153). “Scientific knowledge” establishes the truth on real-world phenomena. On the other hand, knowledge belonging to a set of beliefs judges the world on the basis of values. PD strategically gets these two types of knowledge mixed up. The speaker typically tries to make up a moral standard arising from beliefs in a universal standard. The knowledge stemming from beliefs aims to construct the reality in a realm of meanings. These beliefs are mirrored in utterances within the discourse and are spread afterwards inside a social group, and subsequently becoming reference standards. Accordingly, we speak of “socio-discursive