Candidatos, partidos políticos y electoresactividades de imagen en las cartas electorales españolas para las elecciones al Parlamento Europeo (2004–2019)

Abstract

This paper – of an exploratory, descriptive, and interpretative nature – addresses facework in a corpus of electoral letters sent by the main Spanish political parties from 2004 to 2019 to the citizens. Specifically, research focuses on the electoral letters related to the elections to the European Parliament held in 2004, 2009, 2014 and 2019. Electoral letters are part of the written political discourse as texts in which the candidates to any given elections (sometimes signing alone, sometimes signing together with the President of their Parties, and sometimes along with another text from the President of their Parties sent in the same dispatch) address the potential voters with a persuasive discourse, pursuing to receive their votes. In this context, the candidates’ facework is mostly self-oriented, although there are also politeness strategies addressed to the readers, and criticism towards other political parties or other social actors. Such criticism, framed in impoliteness, often avoids the specific identification of the subject to whom it is addressed, and, in this sense, it can be understood as a depersonalized impoliteness. This paper shows facework (and therefore, the way in which the image of candidates is created) by examining and comparing these letters, not just synchronically (letters sent by different parties regarding the same elections) but also, when possible, diachronically (letters sent by each party to their potential electors along the years).