How to Make Figures Talk: Comparative Argument in TV Election Night Specials

Abstract

Typically, election night specials focus on announcing the results and commenting them. These comments reveal two argumentative stages: the first consists of assessing the scores (“it’s a good/poor result”); the second is explanatory (“this poor score reflects the voters’ disappointment with the outgoing president”/“this high score shows the voters’ longing for change”). The present paper will focus on the assessment process. The observation of election night specials during the last decades in France suggests that an electoral result is not good or bad in itself, but is discursively constructed as such. For instance, the discursive evaluation of a result is often integrated within argumentative sequences that aim at justifying it. We will examine the function of comparison in such argumentative sequences. Based on the transcript of two TV specials after the first round of French presidential elections (April, 22nd, 2012) from two TV channels (TF1 and France 2), we will show how the assessment of the scores relies on various comparisons: between the results obtained by the different candidates within the same election; between the results obtained by one political party in successive presidential elections; between the results obtained by the leaders of different countries confronted with similar economic crisis; between the results predicted by polling organizations and the actual results. We aim at exploring the argumentative use of comparison as well as the associated conditions of acceptability in context.