Reading political minds : "backstage" politics in audience reception

Audiences often speculate about why it is politicians behave in the way they do and say the things they say. Indeed, journalists and academics are frequently called upon to decode these behaviours for “lay” audiences. An integral part of “doing” politics is thus to reconstruct the backstage political processes leading to politicians’ frontstage performances (see Wodak 2009). To account for this speculative activity, I draw on Goffman’s (1981) notion of the “production format” of discourse, alongside concepts from cognitive and social psychology, specifically Schema Theory, Attribution Theory and Theory of Mind. To illustrate this interdisciplinary framework, I analyse journalistic reactions to a speech by the British politician and former Labour Party leader Ed Miliband.