Vagueness in Political Discourse

The paper presents two studies on vagueness in political discourse. The first is a qualitative analysis of the commonsense definition of vagueness and related notions in political discourse. Participants were submitted two fragments of real political argumentations and a questionnaire asking to rate them as to vagueness, sincerity, persuasiveness and other criteria. They showed that two aspects are relevant for a political discourse not to be considered vague: presence of an ideological principle and presence of specific information. The second study tested the relevance of these criteria in voting intentions. Four fragments of argumentation, with and without ideological principle and specific information, were submitted to participants. Results show that higher voting intention is determined by the presence of an ideological principle, but the combination of principle and specific information results in less voting intention, perhaps being seen as confusing.