Political Apologies Research Articles

Political Apologies and the Question of a ‘Shared Time’ in the Australian Context

Although conceptually distinct, ‘time’ and ‘community’ are multiply intertwined within a myriad of key debates in both the social sciences and the humanities. Even so, the role of conceptions of time in social practices of inclusion and exclusion has yet to achieve the prominence of other key analytical categories such as identity and space. This article seeks to contribute to the development of this field by highlighting the importance of thinking time and community together through the lens of political apologies. Often ostensibly offered in order to re-articulate both the constitution of ‘the community’ and its future direction, official apologies are prime examples of deliberate attempts to intervene in shared understandings of political community and its temporality. Offering a detailed case study of one of these apologies, I will focus on Australian debates over the removal of indigenous children from their families, known as the Stolen Generations, and examine the temporal dimensions of the different responses offered by former prime ministers John Howard and Kevin Rudd.

Mere Ritual? Displacing the Myth of Sincerity in Transitional Rituals

Although a number of transitional justice processes involve ritual, such ritual dimensions are repeatedly dismissed as lacking efficacy with respect to the key objectives of transitional justice. Focusing on the case of political apologies, this article exposes the assumptions that underpin such dismissals of ritual, in particular assumptions about the primacy of individual agency in the story of wrongdoing and repair and the failure to adequately distinguish between personal and political contexts. The article draws on theological and social anthropological understandings of ritual to argue that ritual’s efficacy becomes apparent once individual judgments and actions are recognized as constituted through social meanings, which is the level at which ritual operates. The article provides empirical support for a more robust understanding of ritual as socially transformative, while also reflecting on why existing rituals may not be achieving such potentially transformative effects. This analysis is particularly important in the context of transitional justice, where the overall objectives must include the transformation of broad social meanings or political cultures.

Just pretending: political apologies for historical injustice and vice’s tribute to virtue

Should we be concerned with, or alarmed or outraged by, the insincerity and hypocrisy of politicians who apologize for historical injustice? This paper argues that the correct reply to this question is: sometimes, but not always. In order to establish what types of insincerity must be avoided, Judith Shklar’s hierarchy of ordinary vices is critically revisited. Against Shklar’s overly benign account of hypocrisy, the paper then tries to demonstrate that only institutional and harmful forms of hypocrisy must be rejected in political apologies for historical injustice. Employing Melissa Nobles’ ‘membership theory’, this paper defends the claim that the sincerity standard for political apologies is, in stark contrast to apologies between individuals, agent independent. This means that in political apologies, rather than focusing on the remorse and regret of the agent who apologizes, we must primarily examine the apology’s consequences in terms of renegotiating the legal, political and affective dimensions of citizenship. In domestic affairs, the paper shows that apologies can only be considered sincere if they push the polity towards a more inclusive conception of membership in the political community.

Is Political Apology a Sorry Affair?

Making apologies is one of the ways that governments have attempted to deal with past injustices. However, political apologies are often criticised for being meaningless or morally suspect. I will argue that an apology signals the commitment of those who make it, sponsor it and support it to a national undertaking, and whether we can regard an apology as meaningful depends on our reasons for thinking that this undertaking has been initiated and will continue. To defend political apologies from moral criticisms it is necessary to address questions about responsibility: whether citizens can and should take responsibility for past injustices, including injustices of the historical past. The answer to these questions, I will argue, requires an account of the responsibilities entailed in being a citizen of an intergenerational polity.

P.2.010 Carbon dioxide-induced anxiety and the successive negative contrast effect in rats

Dramatic increases in the issuance of political apologies over the last two decades mean that we now live in the “age of apology”. But what does this surge in frequency mean for the effectiveness of intergroup apologies in promoting forgiveness? In the current research we propose a paradoxical “normative dilution” effect whereby behavioral norms increase the perceived appropriateness of an action while at the same time reducing its symbolic value. We experimentally manipulated the salience of the age-of-apology norm prior to assessing participant (N = 128) reactions to past unjust treatment of ingroup POWs by the Japanese during WWII. The apologetic norm increased victim group members' desire for an apology in response to the harm. However, after reading the actual apology, the invocation of the norm decreased perceived apology sincerity and subsequent willingness to forgive. Thus, although apologetic trends may suggest greater contemporary interest in seeking reconciliation and harmony, their inflationary use risks devaluing apologies and undermining their effectiveness.

Apologizing for historical injustice: Emotion, truth and identity in political discourse

The recent apology by the Australian Prime Minister to Indigenous Australians demonstrates the increasing willingness of nation states to apologize for historical injustices. In this critical discursive analysis of Rudd’s apology, we analyse the pragmatic and linguistic features of the apology in light of recent research on political apologies as a generic type of discourse. We demonstrate how the act of offering and justifying an apology was accomplished through the use of emotion and identity categories. In particular, we examine how the reason—emotion dilemma was managed rhetorically by tying emotion to facts, and how differing levels of categorization can all be used to evoke support for apologizing for historical injustice. In contrast to social-psychological experimental work on apologies and forgiveness, we show that different levels of categorization — the personal, intermediate and superordinate — can all be used flexibly in discourse to invoke empathy and identification with the ‘other’, and that rather than invoking emotions in the ingroup, humanizing the ‘other’ is a powerful strategy for eliciting support for redressing social injustice.

Official or political apologies and improvement of intergroup relations: A neo-Durkheimian approach to official apologies as rituals

This article argues that institutional apologies are rituals that can be conceived from a neo-Durkheimian viewpoint as external social tools of collective emotion, which allow people to assume collective guilt and shame, increase agreement with reparatory behaviors, and reinforce social cohesion. The review of studies presented in this monograph shows that an apology reactivates and intensifies collective emotions, mainly of shame and guilt, above and beyond merely reminding people of past misdeeds, and increases support for reparation. Shame and sorrow fuel and support reparative tendencies. Finally, salience of past collective violence together with an apology improves social climate to some extent, enhances intergroup reconciliation by decreasing prejudice and improving intergroup contact, and helps to reconstruct in-group collective memory in a more critical way. Changes in collective emotions and representations of the past mediate the positive effects of apologies on reparation and social cohesion.

Apology: A Small Yet Important Part of Justice

AbstractJean-Marc Coicaud's article begins by stressing the contemporary importance and the current trend of political apology. Recent political apologies offered in Australia and Canada to their indigenous populations form a significant part of this story. He then analyzes a number of intriguing paradoxes at the core of the dynamics of apology. These paradoxes give meaning to apology but also make the very idea of apology extremely challenging. They have to do with the relationships of apology with time, law and the unforgivable. The most intriguing of these paradoxes concerns apology and the unforgivable. Indeed, the greater the wrong, the more valuable the apology. But, then, the more difficult it becomes to issue and to accept an apology. This latter paradox is namely examined in the context of mass crimes, taken from Europe, Africa and Asia. As a whole these paradoxes are all the more intriguing considering what apology in a political context aims to accomplish, for the actor who issues the apology, for the one who receives it, for their relationship, and for the social environment in which this takes place. Jean-Marc Coicaud concludes his article by outlining what the rise of apology means for contemporary political culture.

Government Apologies for Historical Injustices

Scholars from various disciplines suggest that government apologies for historical injustices fulfill important psychological goals. After reviewing psychological literature that contributes to this discussion, we present a list of elements that political apologies should contain to be acceptable to both members of the victimized minority and the nonvictimized majority. Content coding of a list of government apologies revealed that many, but not all, include most of these elements. We then reviewed research demonstrating that political apologies that contain most of these facets are favorably evaluated, but especially by members of the nonvictimized majority. Next, we examined how the demands of victimized minorities affect their satisfaction with government apologies that lack some components. We conclude by discussing the implications of our analysis for when and how governments should apologize.

The pragmatics of political apologies

Despite the wealth of literature generated over the past two decades on the apology as a speech act, the political apology has been relatively neglected as a research topic. This article aims to examine the pragmatics of such apologies as a generic type of discourse by identifying their salient characteristics: they are in the public domain and highly mediated; they are generated by (and generate) conflict and controversy; on the basis of media and viewer evaluations/judgements, they need to contain both an illocutionary force indicating device ( Ifid) and an explicit expression of the acceptance of responsibility/blame for the ‘offence’ in order to be clearly perceived as valid apologies; and they rarely, if ever, involve an expression of absolution. Drawing primarily on data concerning recent political events in the UK (especially the Iraq War), the article attempts to set out and illustrate the different types of political apology. The resulting analysis is related both to previous and current apology research and to recent developments in politeness theory.

Public discourse in America: conversation and community in the twenty-first century

Prologue: The Work of the Penn National Commission -Judith Rodin Introduction: Incivility and Public Discourse -Judith Rodin and Stephen P. Steinberg PART ONE. PUBLIC DISCOURSE AND DEMOCRACY 1. The Thinning of American Political Culture -Thomas Bender 2. Primary Tensions in American Public Life -Robert H. Wiebe 3. Deliberative Democracy and Public Discourse -David M. Ryfe PART TWO. CHALLENGES OF PUBLIC DISCOURSE: TALKING ABOUT RACE 4. Affirmative Action and the Culture of Intolerance -Christopher Edley, Jr 5. The North American -Richard Rodriguez 6. Sports and Public Behavior -Richard Lapchick 7. Performance, Debate, or Productive Conversation? Imagining an Exemplary Conversation on Race -Drew Gilpin Faust and Members of the Penn National Commission PART THREE. LEADING THE PUBLIC'S CONVERSATION: STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY DISCOURSE LEADERSHIP 8. Leadership in a Complex Democratic Society -Michael Schudson 9. Political Leadership in the Great Health Care Debate of 1993-1994 -Derek Bok 10. Part of Our World: Journalism as Civic Leadership -Jay Rosen 11. Modeling Public Discourse in Popular Culture -Neal Gabler PART FOUR: DISCOURSE OF RECONCILIATION: TRUTH, APOLOGY, AND FORGIVENESS 12. Creating a National Discourse: Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa -Alex Boraine 13. Political Apologies and Public Discourse -Graham G. Dodds PART FIVE: Thickening Public Discourse: Principles and Practices 14. The Principles of Public Discourse: What Is Good Public Discourse? -David M. Ryfe 15. A Paradox of Public Discourse and Political Democracy -Neil Smelser 16. The Practice of Public Discourse: A Study of Sixteen Discourse Organizations -David M. Ryfe 17. Lessons from the Field: Practitioner Perspectives on Public Discourse Programs -Jay Rosen and Members of the Penn National Commission PART SIX: CREATING COMMUNITY THROUGH PUBLIC DISCOURSE 18. Building Community in the Twenty-First Century -Joyce Appleby 19. The Myth of Academic Community -Don M. Randel 20. The University as Discourse Community -Judith Rodin 21. Creating Community in Cyberspace: Criteria for a Discourse Technology Project -Stephen P. Steinberg Epilogue: The Centrality of Public Discourse -Stephen P. Steinberg Notes Contributors Bibliography Index Members of the Penn National Commission on Society, Culture and Community Acknowledgments

Oratorical encounters: selected studies and sources of twentieth-century political accusations and apologies

Oratorical encounters: selected studies and sources of twentieth-century political accusations and apologies