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Acting Presidential

The Dramaturgy of Bush Versus Kerry

Salem State College

Dramaturgy, an interactionist perspective, was developed by Erving Goffman, a sociologist working in the theoretical tradition of seminal social theorists including Durkheim and Parsons. This article’s thesis is that although the typical application of dramaturgy has been to interpersonal contexts, dramaturgy’s symbolic orientation and its rich terminological vocabulary make it particularly well suited for the analysis of political communication, widely perceived as a theatrical and symbolic domain. This metatheoretical article attempts to extend dramaturgy to politics, notwithstanding the apparently little interest in politics displayed by Goffman himself. The article’s political focus is the U.S. presidential campaign of 2004, which opposed George Bush and John Kerry. The contest is examined in the dramaturgic terms of performance, expressive control, disidentification, region management, and stigmatization.

Key Words: political communication • political campaigns • dramaturgy • presidential campaigns • performance

American Behavioral Scientist, Vol. 49, No. 1, 78-91 (2005)
DOI: 10.1177/0002764205279397


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