Turn-Taking in Political Interviews and Its Impact on Building Government Credibility

Abstract

Television political inquiry is conducted through question-and-answer exchanges with host and government officials on prominent livelihood issues, which helps to improve the efficiency of government governance. Interview participants’ identity, communicative intention, power, and contextual factors have a significant impact on the discourse choices of both parties. This research clarifies the mechanism by which communicators mobilize appropriate discourse strategies to promote the solution of social problems. It adopts qualitative research method and conversation analysis to interpret interview participants’ talk-in-interaction and discourse strategies in “Ask Government Affairs of Shandong”. Research finds that adjacency pairs in political interview perform social behaviors such as greetings, requests, suggestions, apologies, acknowledgement. Interview participants’ turn-taking is divided into claiming for the turn, holding the turn, and giving up the turn. Discourse strategies such as insertion, interruption, and repetition are adopted to claim for the turn. Discourse markers and conversation repair are applied in communicators’ turn-holding stage. Communicators adopt explicit nominations, vague job designations, and silence strategies to give up the turn. Clear, accurate, and highly relevant official responses are conducive to projecting a responsible government image and improving government credibility. The phenomenon of avoidance, hesitation, and pause in official response is likely to cause the masses to question government officials’ work capability, which is not conducive to establishing a positive and trustworthy government image. Suggestions for optimizing the process setting of political interview and official responses are provided to enhance the effect of political enquiry.