Personalised Storytelling in British Political Rhetoric: Performance, Emotions, and Argument

British politicians have been sharing more personal stories since the mid-1990s, yet little is known about precisely what democratic functions, if any, these stories might serve. A prevailing view in the literature is that the genre of personalised storytelling has little to offer political communication, devaluing speech and debate by promoting anecdotal argument, sentimentalism, and personalisation. In this thesis, I investigate how personalised storytelling can be understood differently. I interpret the personal narratives that politicians share as culturally situated symbolic resources, which enable the performative, rhetorical, and emotional negotiation of contemporary political meaning. In my analysis, I develop this understanding by considering how it applies to the democratic processes of political representation and debate. Specifically, I engage with how politicians’ stories emerge from and give meaning to contextually grounded practices of political representation and argumentation, before exploring the specific merits and shortcomings of these practices, and the implications they have for the way we understand the relationship between personalised storytelling and democratic communication. I do this qualitatively, by undertaking an interdisciplinary textual analysis of personal stories told by British politicians in conference speeches and parliamentary debates between 2010 and 2018, and by conducting semi-structured interviews with a number of the politicians that shared them. Drawing on long-standing theories of narrative, and recent theories of political performance, rhetoric, and emotion, I offer a critical reappraisal of the role personalised storytelling plays in political speech and debate, which captures (1) its entanglement with the contemporary performance of political representation, (2) its significance as an affective and experiential mode of debate, and (3) its complex strategic, emotional, and altruistic meanings for the politicians who engage in it. I conclude by establishing a set of criteria that aims to capture when, and how, personalised storytelling might work in the interests of representative politics and democratic debate.