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Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal – Vol.7, No.12

Publication Date: December 25, 2020

DOI:10.14738/assrj.712.8783.

Afful, J. B. A., & Gyasi, R. B. (2020). Schematic Structure of Manifesto Launch Speeches of Three Political Parties. Advances in Social

Sciences Research Journal, 7(12) 672-690

Schematic Structure of Manifesto Launch Speeches of Three Political

Parties

Joseph Benjamin Archibald Afful

Department of English, Faculty of Arts, University of Cape Coast, Ghana

Rexford Boateng Gyasi

Department of English, Faculty of Arts, University of Cape Coast, Ghana

ABSTRACT

A key pre-election spoken genre in several modern democracies is

unarguably the manifesto launch speech. Yet, it has surprisingly

received either very little or no scholarly attention. Consequently, from

a rhetorical perspective, this study examined the schematic structure of

three keynote speeches delivered by presidential aspirants of three

leading political parties in Ghana – New Patriotic Party (NPP), National

Democratic Congress (NDC), and the Convention People’s Party (CPP) –

to launch their political parties’ manifestos in 2016. The three speeches

delivered by the presidential candidates of the three parties constituted

the data set for the study. Applying the popular Swalesean rhetorical

move analysis, originally meant for the academic setting, the study

identified the use of a nine-move pattern as the schematic structure for

the genre across the three speeches, with four ambiguous moves. These

findings of the study have implication for the standardizing of the

schematic structure of manifesto launch speeches worldwide and, thus,

contributes to the scholarship on the political manifesto genre, political

communication as well as further research on manifesto launch

speeches in other democracies around the world.

Keywords: democracy, election, Ghana, manifesto launch speech, political

discourse

INTRODUCTION

There is a growing interest in the discourse of political actors as several political discourse analysts

continue to investigate the rhetoric of politicians, with the improvement and sustenance of

governance and the practice of democracy in several countries. Politics involves a struggle for

power between an incumbent and challenger [1]; hence, there is the dominant use of persuasive

mechanisms: whereas incumbents seek to ensure retrospective voting, challengers mostly utilize

negative campaigning to downgrade opponents in order to appear the more favourable in an

election [2, 3].

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Afful, J. B. A., & Gyasi, R. B. (2020). Schematic Structure of Manifesto Launch Speeches of Three Political Parties. Advances in Social Sciences Research

Journal, 7(12) 672-690

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.14738/assrj.712.8783 673

In the face of keen competition among political parties, political candidates utilize slogans, posters

and fliers, presidential debates, manifestos and launching of manifestos as means of persuading the

electorates. The choice between parties or candidates is ideally a choice between ideals,

philosophies, policies, and programmes. In order to communicate party ideals and programmes, to

the electorate, and to provide yardsticks for performance and assessment, party manifestos are

employed. In a few cases where parties do not publish electoral programmes, proxy documents,

such as party leader speeches, general party platforms, etc., are coded as substitute documents [4].

There is no gainsaying the fact that manifestos play a key role in the campaigns of modern political

parties. In growing democracies, especially in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, where insults can be

so vitriolic, manifestos not only promote issue-based politicking during the electioneering period

but also contribute to ensuring peaceful campaigns. Given that manifestos tend to encapsulate the

key issues or problems that confront a nation and demonstrate the pathways to tackling them, they

have become a veritable means of garnering group support for political parties and their candidates

during elections. Some scholars acknowledge that a party that campaigns on a manifesto is likely to

secure wider support among segments of the voting population [5-7]. Through manifestos, political

parties ‘set out set out their proposed responses to social needs and demands from the electorate’

[8, p. 368]. Also, in several democracies, political office-seekers spend huge resources, energy, and

time on their manifestos to promote issue-based campaigns, which represent an important factor

in determining candidates’ electoral fortunes [9].

The manifesto is obviously the first legitimate document that signals to the citizenry the

preparedness of both the incumbent and the opposition parties to contest in an election. Manifestos

are mostly scripted and, with the advent of technology, stored on party websites and other modern

technological affordances; hence, it has become customary in Ghana for the presidential candidates

of political parties to present highlights of the manifesto at an organized gathering and to officially

launch it for formal campaigning to commence. The verbal articulation in the form of manifesto

launch speech has scarcely received scholarly attention.

Aim of the Study

The field of political discourse continues to attract considerable attention among researchers,

scholars, and students in recent times, given the acceptance of western democracies in several

countries. Unsurprisingly, analyses of presidential political speeches like inaugural speeches, state

of the nation’s address, anniversary speeches, presidential debates [10], presidential rhetoric [11]

as well as non-presidential political speeches [see 12-14] have received considerable attention. In

comparison, election manifestos have not matched up to the interest in, for instance, presidential

and non-presidential speeches. A few studies on political manifestos such as those in Africa [see 15-

17], and those outside the continent Africa [18-20] have been undertaken. In spite of the growing

interest in manifesto and its importance in multi-party states like Ghana, which continues to be

touted as a sub-Saharan African country with great democratic credentials there is a dearth of

literature on manifesto launch speeches. The present study aims to fill this gap in knowledge and

contribute to the scholarship on the political manifestos launch speeches by focusing on the political

parties in Ghana, a modern democracy. The main question that guides the study is: what is the

schematic structure of manifesto launch speeches?

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Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal (ASSRJ) Vol.7, Issue 12, December-2020

In what follows, we first present the theoretical framework of the study as well as delineation of

some key concepts. This is followed by a critical review of previous studies on manifestos.

Thereafter, we describe the method and analytical framework adopted in the study. We then report

and discuss the findings related to the move structure of manifesto launch speech. Finally, we draw

conclusions from our findings together with some implications and make some recommendations

for further research.

RELATED LITERATURE

In this section, we first delineate Swales’ [21] rhetorical theory, followed by a discussion of two key

concepts namely ‘political discourse’ and ‘campaign discourse’ as both provide a clear conceptual

and interpretive framework for the present study.

Swales (1990) Rhetorical Genre Theory

First articulated in 1981 and later revised in 1990, Swales’ influential work recognized genre as a

set of communicative events with a shared communicative purpose which is recognized by a

discourse community. Swales’ approach to genre analysis projects that the principal determinant of

a genre is a set of communicative purposes that distinguish one text from another. The genre

analysis doyen intimates that the communicative purpose(s) of a particular text constitutes the

rationale of the genre, which in turn performs two functions; it shapes the schematic structure of

the text and governs the selection of content and style [21]. Swales identifies sub-communicative

intentions of parts of a text that come together to realize the main communicative purpose of the

text as ‘moves’. These moves may range from a single sentence to a series of sentences as Swales

and other genre analysts like Bhatia [22] and Hyland [23] warn that the term ‘move’ is not

coterminous with any grammatical category. Apart from moves, other rhetorical strategies such as

‘steps’ (or ‘sub-moves’) may be used to realize the communicative purpose of a genre.

Following from the above is the fact that the Move analysis model incorporates both a formal

(structural) and substantial (content) analysis of text. The former involves a macro level approach

to genre analysis, whereby the structure of the texts or the number of moves, the purposes of the

moves (based on cognitive-semantics), and how the main communicative purpose realized by these

sub-rhetorical sections (that is, ‘moves’) of the text are identified. The boundary of moves is

determined by the cognitive-semantic structuring of parts of the text [24] which aims at realizing

the main communicative purpose of the genre. Thus, “Whenever a linguistic unit indicates a

communicative intention subservient to the general communicative purpose of the discourse a

move can be identified.” [12, p 2409]. The second phase of analysis in Swales’ approach involves a

micro level analysis of lexical and grammatical features in the texts and how they contribute to the

communicative purpose(s) of the genre. The present study is devoted to the macro aspect rather

than the micro aspect due to space constraint.

Another pertinent issue later enunciated by Swales [21] lies in the ways that genres relate to other

genres, forming “constellations”. Like human beings, genres exist in neighbourhoods, evoking terms

such as ‘genre sets’ and ‘genre chain’. The underlying assumption for both concepts is that we almost

never find genres in isolation. In the case of “genre sets,” we refer to the part of the entire genre

constellation that a particular individual or group engages in, either productively or receptively

[25]. Textbooks, lab reports, and lectures, for instance, may be key genres for many science students,

while discussion postings and online tutorials are genres more familiar to distance-learning