The Roles And Uses Of Political Rhetoric Politics Essay

The Roles And Uses Of Political grandiloquence Politics EssayThis paper discusses how Aristotle defined grandiloquence and analyzes the reason out that went into development of a persuasive speech. This paper looks at the three types of rhetoric Aristotle described as well as the explanation for the role and place of rhetoric in todays political environment.Political RhetoricRhetoric as defined by Aristotle was the ability, in each particular case, to use theavailable means of persuasion. In general, rhetoric is the energy inherent in emotion and apprehension,transmitted through a system of signs, including language, to others to influence their decisionsor actions(Kennedy, pp. 5-8). Aristotle introduces rhetoric as an art which focuses onpersuasion and the mingled methods used to convince an audience of a specific point of view.Some people see rhetoric as a technique of manipulation and not a form of persuasion,however, as with everything that point is debatable. In general, rhetoric is the art of publicspeaking and view. Rhetorical skills are valued in such professions as teaching, law, religion,news reporting and politics. While the purpose of rhetoric concentrates on the emotionalresponse of sensitive topics such as religion and politics, the supreme goal of rhetoric is to s port geniuss opinion. Professional rhetoricians dont have to be honest in the speech, they do, however must(prenominal) show a form of entertainment and be effective.Aristotle described three major rhetorical means of persuasion ethos, pathos and logos. Ethos uses trust to persuade the audience. A politician uses his or her respective reputation and what is perceive and said about them however in that respect is a close connection between reputation and reality. Credibility depends both on expertise and how this is portrayed. In nightspot to persuade the audience, you must first believe in yourself. Pathos does not directly involve the argument itself instead pathos relies o n the emotions of the audience. An efficient way to move the audience is to appeal to their values. intelligence is Greek for logic and is used to persuade the audience by demonstrating the truth and is based on scientific facts. Logos is also used to appeal to the intellect of the audience, and is considered an argument of logic.The use of rhetoric is very apparent in political speeches and the outcome is measured by a vote placed by each member of the audience. Aristotelian rhetoric assumes that you believethe politician, and disbelieve every other politicians that have different views. The persuasivenessor manipulation of a speech not only depends on the nature of the speech, but also on thebelievability of its origin and beliefs shared by the speaker and the audience. The audienceis attracted to the integrity, passion and reasoning of the speaker. The speaker must find theproper balance of the aforementioned qualities in the debate in order to be effective. In the endthe audi ence is persuaded because they sense that the speaker is an expert on the topic based onhis or her substantial confidence and the amount of emotion involved.Rhetoric used in the pastThe foundation of the modern approach to society, including the entirety of the modernpolitical system, is fallout from the medieval rediscovery of Aristotles work during theCrusades, Europeans re-discovered Latin translations of Aristotle in various libraries throughoutthe Islamic world. When rhetoric is applied to political speech, therefore, it may beconcluded that the politician is attempting to sway the publics opinion in a manner that is partialand false.Today political parties in the United States play an integral role in political elections,local, state and national. Parties have become a vehicle for exerting the ideas and agenda of largeand collective groups of citizens. However, political parties in colonial Ameri laughingstock and the earlyRepublic were viewed negatively, by both early politi cians and philosophers. Even the foundingfathers had issues with political parties. Parties were thought to divide Americans. Also, thinkersof the time thought that forming parties would result in spawning a winning side and a losingside in elections, which would further split Americans. People in society today are greatlyinfluenced by what they read. The articles in the newspapers skew peoples beliefs of politicalaffairs and current events in the same way that biased articles in popular magazines seem toshape the way the general public views different types of cultural aspects. Keeping this in mind,it is especially important to note that during the 1800s, the people lacked other forms of mediaand communication that people in modern times are influenced by. Instead, they relied heavilyon literature to entertain themselves, most of which shaped the way they viewed culture, politics,and life itself. ascertain how politicians use rhetoric to promote their policies. We focus on apartic ular type of rhetorical appeal-those based on emotionally charged predictions about insurance consequences. For politicians, we emphasize maximizing and strategic behavior,reflecting their full-time employment in politics and large personal stakes in political outcomes.Political leaders motivation to win policy debates and they employ rhetoric in an effort to move publicopinion to their respective sides. The very reason for public political debate between parties is tosway those preferences in one or the other direction. Politicians often try to shape citizensbeliefs about current conditions and the likelihood that particular outcomes will arrive if a policyis or is not put into law (e.g., Jerit, 2009 Lupia Menning, 2009). Politicians can attempt toform and change such beliefs, fundamentally, because of the role of uncertainty in policydecisions. There is always considerable and sometimes enormous uncertainty about the impact ofproposed policies (see, e.g., Riker, 1996).1 Not eve n experts really know the consequences of apolicy in advance. We agree that value-based arguments are an important part of politiciansrhetoric. If politics were solely about values, each side would assert its values early, and citizenswould line up on one side or the other. Politicians say many things during the course of a policydebate, and so the first task is to identify the forms that political rhetoric and argument can take.From the perspective of politicians seeking to persuade citizens, the three potentially mostvaluable forms are assertions of core party values and principles, predictions of future states,3and factual descriptions of current circumstances. entirely three forms of political rhetoric aremotivated by party leaders desires to sway opinion in the preferred direction, although eachform has its aver purpose. If parties can shape beliefs, and thus preferences, by taking advantageof uncertainty and strategically using rhetoric, then winning elections and winning p olicy debatesthrough rhetorical persuasion are both possible, if not mutually reinforcing. Political rhetoric willnot evolve in precisely the same way across different policy debates.We have offered several propositions about how politicians should behave when they believethey can shape citizens beliefs. They also show that neither politicians nor the media seem toprovide citizens with reliable, readily identified cues to help distinguish those that are worthtaking seriously from those that are just hot air. Under such circumstances, what can wereasonably stock from citizens who are asked to render political judgments? Speculations onCitizens Responses to Political Rhetoric To address citizens responses to predictive rhetoric,we first comment on two important perspectives in political psychology that appear to suggestgrounds for expecting quite competent performance. test is crucial to understanding the uses ofpredictive rhetoric and its consequences for citizen competence. Unfor tunately, we are about tonavigate generally uncharted waters. 11 Citizens Assessments of Asserted Links in PredictiveArguments Assuming that citizens care about the outcome, they will consciously orunconsciously consider the claimed touch base between the focal policy and that outcome. Does animportant causal linkage exist? To avert effort, and lacking expertise in the policy area, citizenswill limit their answers to a simple categorical question Is there a genuine, significant link of thesort claimed, or is the claimed link minimal or nonexistent? Unlike experts, modal(a) peoplegenerally will not bother with refined distinctions, for example, attempting to distinguishbetween a very important and a somewhat important link. To avoid being manipulated,unaligned citizens will not take politicians at their word, but rather will try to assess the validityof an alleged link independently. In hard-hitting for independent corroboration, they will employsimple heuristics, including the following three in particular. We concluded that rhetoricalpredictions about the consequences of policies create obstacles for citizens who seek to makereasonable decisions. demonstrationIn this very exploratory chapter, we have considered the political logic of policy rhetoric the prominence of appeals that rely on extreme and mostly negative predictions and seek to elicit an emotional response the processes that citizens use in determining their response and the consequences of those processes for the competence of individual and collective decisions about policy. To put our findings simply, the information environment in which citizens make decisions about policies presents a constant stream of dramatic, emotionally salient predictive claims, covering a wide range of outcomes, and presented largely without supporting enjoin or other diagnostic information. The highly partisan cope with this constant stream by adopting the party line. The unaligned have no such luxury, and thus m ust try to make sense of the political rhetoric. Sometimes the dire predictions elicit some form of corroborating information-apertinent schema, an example from daily life, or the like-in the minds of these citizens, thus vibrancy a bell with them. There is little reason to suppose that the predictive appeals that ring a bell in this way correspond at all closely to the considerations that would prove decisive in an environment that encouraged deliberate judgment on the basis of realistic claims and the best available diagnostic information. But, then, there is no reason to believe that taking party cues does, either.