Prime Minister's Questions Research Articles

Disclaiming in the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson's Questions (PMQs) Sessions: A Pragmatic perspective

The study conducts disclaiming, which states that one has no responsibility for or knowledge of something that has occurred. Specifically, this research examines disclaiming language in spontaneous verbal interactions, particularly during Boris Johnson's Prime Minister's Questions sessions. The main goal of the study is to analyze the forms of disclaiming that Boris Johnson employed during these sessions and identifying the most common type. It also explores the pragmatic strategies employed in Boris Johnson's Prime Minister's Questions sessions. The research methodology involves presenting a theoretical overview of disclaimers alongside a comprehensive analysis of the chosen data using qualitative and quantitative methods. The research findings indicate that the representation of disclaimers in Boris Johnson's sessions relies fundamentally on three key types that frequently occur during these sessions. Furthermore, the study also highlights the pragmatic strategies that underpin the use of disclaimers, including speech acts, Grice’s conversational maxims, and politeness strategies. These findings emphasize the complex interplay between pragmatic strategies and the use of disclaiming in verbal interactions and highlight the importance of utilizing disclaiming in political discourse.

The brace of the cabinet: the legacy of Clement Attlee as deputy prime minister

ABSTRACT The position of the UK deputy prime minister is clouded in mystery. The title suggests a minster of some seniority, one likely to step in for an absent premier to chair a cabinet meeting or perform at prime minister’s questions (PMQs) – but that is merely supposition. No official statement exists to explain the functions the position entails or indeed to confirm that it endures as anything more substantial than a courtesy title. Using archive material and other resources, this article will try to expose this constitutional phantom. To achieve this task, there will be close examination of the first individual to be publicly announced – in February 1942 – as the UK’s deputy prime minister, Clement Attlee. Though there will be discussion of some of the tasks Attlee performed in this capacity (tasks which have influenced the development of deputy prime ministership as an institution), the primary purpose of this article is to help lift some of the constitutional smog. In particular, it will illuminate why – in contrast to analogous positions such as the US vice president – the British deputy prime minister is still not regarded as any more likely to succeed a prime minister than any other senior minister.

On the ritualization of commemorative practices: Paying tribute in British Prime Minister's Questions

In this paper, paying tribute is analyzed as an emergent ritual for national commemoration at British Prime Minister's Questions (PMQs). This study draws on data taken from some of the earliest audio recordings available (1978–1988) to more recent video footage (2003–2013), and Hansard, the official record of parliamentary proceedings. The diachronic interactional sociolinguistic study suggests that paying tribute constitutes a rather unusual practice in which parliamentary speakers tend to display unity across party ranks. In the older dataset, the prime minister's paying tribute is prompted by a substantial parliamentary question. By contrast, in the more recent dataset, the initial ritual answer turn slot has emerged as a locus for ritualized commemoration. The observed process of ritualization, which is accompanied by an individualization and distinction of the troops killed in action, is discussed against the backdrop of political events and as well as changes in the institutionalized procedure in parliament.

"The Power of Words: Some Notes on the Language of Political Discourse in an Exchange from a Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) Session"

The paper dwells on the language of a political dialogue between two members of the UK Parliament in the House of Commons during the weekly event called Prime Minister’s Questions, which took place on the 29th March 2023. At the time, standing in for the Prime Minister was the Conservative Deputy Prime Minster, Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, Dominic Raab; the other MP is Shadow Minister for the Cabinet Office, Deputy Leader of the Opposition and Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Angela Rayner. The present analysis highlights textual and linguistic features of the discourse from several points of view: that of register, pragmatic and semantic, lexico-grammatical, rhetorical and stylistic. The verbal exchange is heated, with an intensely dramatic effect, with all the elements converging towards the conative function of communication, as the public is meant to be drawn to one side or the other of the political agenda.

How to Argue with Questions and Answers: Argumentation Strategies in Parliamentary Deliberation

While apparently designed to request information, parliamentary questions are the most challenging and face-threatening acts, used argumentatively by opposition members of parliament (MPs) to confront and attack government MPs, and especially the Prime Minister (PM) in the notoriously adversarial Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs). By contextually, discursively and rhetorically articulating varying degrees of relevance and persuasiveness, questioning and answering practices serve as basic debating tools for MPs, whose main parliamentary role and responsibility consist of holding the government and the PM accountable. The aim of this paper is to explore how argumentation/counter-argumentation strategies and persuasive/dissuasive techniques are shaped through the co-performance of MPs’ questioning and the PM’s answering practices in PMQs. To better capture the effects of the shifting dynamics of polemical question-answer exchanges between political adversaries, the present analysis is based on the cross-fertilization of pragma-rhetoric and argumentation theory. The commonalities and complementarities of these approaches have been used to identify and problematize the higher or lower degrees of argumentation at the question-answer interface in terms of valid or fallacious reasoning patterns in three categories of strategic questions: yes/no questions, wh-questions and disjunctive questions.

Meta-questions and meta-answers: The interplay of metadialogic practices in PMQs

In UK Prime Minister's Questions (PMQs), metadialogic practices can steer the direction and scope of the parliamentary confrontation between the Leader of the Opposition (LO) or opposition Members of Parliament (MPs), and the Prime Minister (PM), which consists of polemical question-answer exchanges. Recurrent metadialogic practices are rationally and/or emotionally instantiated through meta-questions (posed by the LO) and meta-answers (delivered by the PM). This investigation used a pragma-rhetorical approach to the interplay between parliamentary meta-questions and meta-answers, which reveals, through the PM's evasiveness or failure to answer the LO's and opposition MPs' questions, a reluctance to play by the (parliamentary) rules and assume responsibility as head of government, party leader and ‘primus inter pares’ in the UK Parliament. The findings show that meta-questions and meta-answers interact at discursive, interpersonal and institutional levels. At the discursive level, they point to the debaters' appraisal of the urgency and importance of debated issues and to the debaters' commitments. At the interpersonal level, they indicate the scope of the debaters' strengths and weaknesses, and the degree of their adversarialness. At the institutional level, they signal the debaters' compliance with or defiance of institutional norms that regulate MPs' behaviour and verbal performance during PMQs.

The power of the loser: Evidence on an agenda‐setting model of opposition policy influence

AbstractThe policy influence of political parties is a classic subject of investigation in political science research. The typical conclusion is that parties influence policy only through government: The government controls the legislative process and has the parliamentary majority to legislate; the opposition is shut out. Yet the legislative process is merely the final part of a much longer policy process starting with an agenda‐setting phase that decides the issues of political conflict in the first place. This study proposes an agenda‐setting model of opposition policy influence which hypothesises sizable opposition policy influence through agenda‐setting: A government is likely to adopt legislation covering the opposition's position in order to silence opposition agenda‐setting. The model is tested on the manual coding of 316 Acts of Parliament adopted by the government and 26,533 Prime Minister's Questions from the Opposition across six issues in Britain (1979‒2015). The results have important implications for minority representation.

Questioning scrutiny: the effect of Prime Minister’s Questions on citizen efficacy and trust in parliament

ABSTRACT In most democratic regimes, the public often dislikes and distrusts parliamentarians. This should not surprise: the public likes neither compromise nor conflict, both of which are legislative hallmarks. One of the most famous examples of parliamentary conflict is Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) in the British House of Commons. It is the most viewed and commented upon part of the parliamentary week, but attracts strong criticism as a noisy charade promoting a poor image of politics. Does PMQs undermine individual levels of political efficacy and trust in Parliament, as some commentators suggest? We use an experimental design to answer this question and find evidence to suggest that, contrary to its negative reputation, PMQs does not adversely affect most citizens’ perceptions.

Questioning scrutiny: the effect of Prime Minister's Questions on citizen efficacy and trust in parliament

Questioning scrutiny: the effect of Prime Minister's Questions on citizen efficacy and trust in parliament

Visuo-material performances

AbstractDrawn from a larger project on reported speech in parliamentary interaction (Reber, forthcoming), this paper studies visuo-material performances of so-called “literalized” (Rumsey, 1992) quoting, i.e., verbatim reproductions of original utterances. Taking an interactional-linguistic perspective, I analyze how participants accomplish ‘literalized’ reported speech through vocal, verbal, and visual cues, recruiting their material documents. The data are culled from video recordings of Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs), a parliamentary session where the Prime Minister (PM) takes questions from the Leader of the Opposition (LO) and Members of Parliament (MPs) at the British House of Commons. I place my focus on cases where speakers use original documents as visual aids, a classic rhetoric device of persuasion, and show how paper documents are constituted, celebrated, and rhetorically enacted as (seemingly) original documents in embodied, situated ways. As a conclusion, I argue that the display of original documents allows the speaker to make claims of having not only evidential but also experiential access to their sources, a practice that underpins their evidential authority.

“And I quote”: Forms and functions of quotations in Prime Minister's questions

This paper examines the strategic use of the communicative act of quotation in mediated political discourse in Prime Minister's Questions (PMQs), considering the interdependencies between source and formatting on the one hand, and the use of metadata on the other.Quotations have been described as a special form of metarepresentation. They refer to prior discursive contributions and import and metarepresent them in another context, making explicit relevant contextual coordinates. As for their formatting, quotations have generally been classified as direct, indirect, hypothetical, mixed and mixed type, and the analysis of PMQs has identified another format: focussing. There is also variation in the formatting of quotatives, which frame the quotation and indicate the quoter's attitude towards the quoted.In PMQs, quotations fulfil an argumentative function. It is argued that by importing quoted, source and contextual coordinates at a particular stage in the discourse, they are assigned the status of quote-worthiness: they may be used to secure discourse common ground, to challenge argumentative coherence and credibility of Other while supporting those of Self. As for quoted sources, experts and allies are generally not explicitly taken up in the follow-up argumentation – unless refuted.

Can’t Answer? Won’t Answer? An Analysis of Equivocal Responses by Theresa May in Prime Minister’s Questions

The aim of this study was to investigate whether typologies devised for the analy-sis of equivocation in broadcast political interviews could be usefully extended tothe analysis of equivocation in Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs). The study wasbased on the 23 sessions of PMQs held during Theresa May’s first term of office(July 2016 to April 2017). Results showed that May’s mean reply rate to questionsfrom Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn was just 11%, and that her distinctive equiv-ocation style was essentially covert, characterised primarily by ignoring questions,modifying questions, stating or implying that she had already answered ques-tions and acknowledging questions without answering them

Question Design and the Rules of Questioning in UK Prime Ministers Questions and Ghanaian Ministers Questions

This paper examines how parliamentarians design their questions and flout parliamentary rules of questioning, leading to confrontations between parliamentarians (MPs) and (Prime) Ministers. A comparative corpus-assisted discourse analysis of UK Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) and Ghanaian Minister’s Questions (GMQs) indicates that GMQs are less confrontational than PMQs since Ghanaian Parliamentary Speakers prevent MPs from asking, for example, questions of opinion and argumentation, which contain strong emotions, generate attacks, accusations and counter-accusations. The paper argues that the confrontations and (counter-)attacks result from the way MPs design their questions. The paper suggests that “yobbery and public school twittishness” in PMQs could be curtailed if the Speaker would disallow questions that flout parliamentary rules of questioning as it is done in GMQs. The paper has implications for parliamentary interactions generally.

‘What I would say to John and everyone like John is ...’: The construction of ordinariness through quotations in mediated political discourse

This article examines the discursive construction of ordinariness in the context of mediated political discourse, considering in particular contexts, in which ‘non-ordinary speakers’ quote ordinary people, bring them into the mediated public arena and assign them and their quoted contributions the status of an object of talk, and in which ‘ordinary speakers’ follow up on the ‘brought-in-ordinariness’. The contexts under investigation are Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) transmitted in the social media and commenters’ posts on the exchanges between the Prime Minister’s and Leader of the Opposition’s bringing-in-ordinariness. The Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition treat the ‘brought-in-ordinariness’ in an ordinary manner by naming quoter and quoted and providing responses to the quoted questions while accommodating the political elite in their contributions; some of the ordinary commenters take up the ‘brought-in-ordinariness’ by negotiating its perlocutionary effects with evaluative metacomments. The ‘brought-in-ordinariness’ receives various kinds of uptakes, ranging from enthusiastic responses hailing true democracy to negative responses criticizing the non-professional manner of doing politics.

Prime ministerial self-reported actions in Prime Minister's Questions 1979–2010: A corpus-assisted analysis

This article analyses prime ministerial self-representation in the context of responses to the questions put to four recent British Prime Ministers during Prime Minister's Questions. From the transcripts of these PMs’ contributions to PMQs, all the clauses with ‘I’ as subject were identified. Corpus analysis software was used to calculate which are the most frequent verbs of which ‘I’ is the subject when PMs answer questions during PMQs. The verbs were classified semantically, and pragmatic and rhetorical patterns were identified. Results show a high proportion of cognitive and communicative processes, as opposed to verbs denoting physical or material actions. Through the close analysis of PMs’ utterances featuring structures with ‘I’ and three frequent verbs – think, understand and say – we explore patterns in their argumentation, management of face and authority, and identification with the norms of this political institution as well as those of the wider society. We argue that normative influences on what PMs represent themselves as doing include explicit constraints on parliamentary behaviour, an adversarial culture that persists despite long-standing criticisms, and the requirement to conform both to the conventions of this ritualised discourse situation and to broader socio-cultural expectations.

Policy Representation by Party Leaders and Followers: What Drives UK Prime Minister’s Questions?

This article demonstrates how party leaders (frontbenchers) and backbenchers use their access to UK Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) to represent the policy agenda. Building on comparative research on parliamentary questions and agenda-setting as well as taking account of the particular context of PMQs, we argue that party leaders and followers draw attention to different kinds of policy topics with the express purpose of influencing the government. Based on a content analysis of over 9,000 questions between 1997 and 2008, we demonstrate how the posing of questions affects subsequent agenda, varying according to whether questions come from the front or backbench, from government and opposition and from different parties. The findings demonstrate that PMQs helps both the opposition and backbenchers draw attention to issues that the government and opposition party leadership does not always wish to attend to.

Goodbye to All That

AbstractThis article is the retirement reflections of an MP of thirty‐eight year's standing. The story is mainly one of the decline of the Commons, a decline in the number of ‘big beasts’ and in the calibre of members and the quality of debates to the level of five‐minute harangues and the custard pie‐throwing of Prime Minister's Question Time. The House has lost its functions of staging the national debate and checking the executive to the media but has gained a new role as a national audit of government's performance and policies through the select committee system. MPs are working harder. Fewer now have outside jobs. They are more focused on their constituencies and though they have fewer powers there, and nationally more and better staff, they also have less respect and less influence. Personally, the end of what has been a long‐fighting national retreat from social democracy has been a rear‐guard action against the emergence of a colder, harder, neoliberal world. Retirement means relegation to watching that from the sidelines, not ringside.

(Im)politeness during Prime Minister’s Questions in the U.K. Parliament

Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) is a weekly, half-hour long session in the British House of Commons, which gives backbench Members of Parliament (MPs) and the Leader of the Opposition (LO) the opportunity to ask the Prime Minister (PM) questions on any topic relating to the government’s policies and actions. The discourse at PMQs is often described as adversarial (see Bull & Wells 2011) and in this paper I will show how the notion of impoliteness can be applied to both the questions and the answers which make up the session. Through the detailed analysis of six sessions of PMQs I will also demonstrate that PMQs is also a source of polite linguistic behaviour of the sort described in Brown & Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory. Comparisons between Gordon Brown’s and David Cameron’s speech styles will also be drawn.

Constructing evidence at Prime Minister's Question Time: An analysis of the grammar, semantics and pragmatics of the verb see

Abstract Constructing evidence constitutes a practice to establish the speaker's authority at Prime Minister's Question Time (PMQT), a weekly half-hour session in the British House of Commons. Here the verb see constitutes a resource for both the questioning Leader of the Opposition (LO) and Members of Parliament (MP) as well as for the responding Prime Minister (PM) to claim first-hand perceptual experience. This paper takes an integrated approach, offering a combined analysis of the grammatical formatting, semantics and pragmatics of the verb see in the context of evidential moves at PMQT. It shows how the verb see is functional in referring to the perceptual basis of a claim made and how its grammatical formatting is reflective of the contingencies of the local interactional context. The analysis is grounded in 32 sessions of PMQT (ca. 16 hrs of video-recordings). The results can be summarised as follows: 1) The evidential function of the verb is achieved through its context-specific grammatical formatting and semantics. 2) The reference to the perceptual basis of a claim evoked by see may co-occur with epistemic qualification and evaluative expressions. 3) The formatting of the verb may be indexical of the political relationship between the questioner and the responding PM.

Prime Minister's questions as political ritual

This article contends that Prime Minister's Questions (PMQs) are a political ritual that supports a gender regime in the House of Commons. After a brief description of PMQs their context and nature are discussed from the standpoints of participants and observers. Then new evidence of the attitudes of MPs and the public is presented in which differences between women and men are analysed and discussed. These findings challenge the notion that PMQs are off-putting to the public, especially women, but show that many MPs are ambivalent, women more than men. The conclusions discuss these unexpected findings and assess their significance to the political representation of women and the nature of parliamentary politics.