Michael de Laine

Race and gender determine how politicians speak

By Michael de Laine, Copenhagen, 25^th January 2009

Race and gender influence the way politicians speak, which is not always to their advantage, according to a new study that looks at the speech patterns of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and others. Obama “displays self-confidence and serenity and remains calm and composed under stress,” researchers say.

Camelia Suleiman from Florida International University and Daniel O’Connell from Georgetown University in the US have concluded race and gender influence the way politicians speak, but this is not always to their advantage.

The researchers’ findings have been published online in Springer’s Journal of Psycholinguistic Research.

Suleiman and O’Connell compared the language of male and female, and black and white politicians to determine whether ethnicity and gender play a role in the way they speak.

They studied transcripts of interviews between Larry King on CNN TV and Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice.

Specifically, the researchers studied how the politicians’ speech was constructed: the number of syllables spoken, the use of interjections, interruptions, self-referent ‘I’, non-standard English such as ‘gonna’, ‘y’know’, and laughter.

Their analysis shows that language reflects a social hierarchy that is not explicitly acknowledged.

The ’subordinate’ roles of black race and female gender are revealed in speech patterns with ‘dominant’ white males. And they are expressed differently in conversations with a white female, a black male and a black female.

In effect, a degree of racism and sexism is reproduced by the very people who oppose these societal attitudes.

The researchers, in focusing on Barack Obama’s language in particular, found that his presentation of himself is nothing like traditional black political orators such as Martin Luther King or Jesse Jackson. Barack Obama does not deliver the poetic sermon of a past generation of African American leaders.

Rather, like Condoleezza Rice, Obama displays self-confidence and serenity and remains calm and composed under stress. He stays focused and does not communicate obvious emotion.

According to Suleiman and O’Connell, both Obama and Rice are accomplished models of a new generation of African American leaders.

The researchers note that Obama and Rice “need to be even more careful about what they say than their white political colleagues, because they are judged on the use of their language differently than their white counterparts.”

Reference: Suleiman C & O’Connell DC (2008). Race and gender in current American politics: a discourse-analytic perspective. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 10.1007/s10936-008-9087-x