Language, Gender and Floor Apportionment in Political Debates
Abstract
Political debates are speech events which foreground issues of power and the `floor', and allow the opportunity of assessing the ways in which the gender of participants affects their construction as more or less powerful participants in debates. Debates in the British House of Commons are adversarial in style, making it appropriate to view the floor as `the site of a contest where there is a winner and a loser'. Previous research into political debates has found that male participants violate the formal rules in debates more than their female counterparts, in order to gain the floor. Although the canonical form and rules of debates exist to `permit the equalization of turns', rule violations are common, and inequalities between participants exist. In this article legal and illegal interventions are evaluated in five debates in order to establish the extent to which the gender of participants is related to the control that an individual has over the debate floor.
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1.
1. This research took place between July 1998 and March 1999. The government party (elected in May 1997) was the Labour Party, the main opposition party was the Conservative Party.
2.
2. Interview data from two backbench MPs-one from the Labour Party, and one from the Liberal Democrat Party - was incorporated into this paper. Both wished to remain anonymous.
3.
3. The remaining illegal interventions were three-part exchanges that were not oppositional (they were supportive, or corrected the content of the CMP's speech in a supportive way). This type of intervention accounted for five (12%) of the 41 illegal responses. A further seven (17%) illegal responses arose from occasions in which the CMP directly addressed a sitting MP, and the sitting MP (or IMP) responded (usually by saying `yes' or `no') to the CMP. These two categories are not included in the analysis because they are not oppositional or violative of the turn-taking rights of the CMP.
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