Features of Political Participation

Political participation may be defined not only as the activity of politicians on one side and mere voting of citizens on the other, but also as the effort to persuade someone how to vote, attend a protest for a political candidate or particular cause and also to write an apologetic or protesting letter to the newspapers. Action like these may be perceived as social because unlike the act of voting which is usually in developed democracies a secret act the public participation consists of some exchange between the person who want to say or change something by particular activity and the audience to which this activity is primarily devoted to. In other words, these actions are forms of public opinion expression (Hayes, Scheufele and Huge 263).

To become a skillful political speaker means to manage all aspect of intelligence: analytical, creative and, especially, practical. The last of them may be considered the most important one because, above all, practical intelligence helps to manage the so-called political skill. And this political skill which may be learnt only to some degree is presumably dependent on the so-called tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge may be defined as social skill gained through various experiences during a particular time. Tacit knowledge may be, furthermore, compared to intuition, common sense, good feeling or a snack. Politicians who have acquired a management of tacit knowledge and consequently also the political skills have a higher probability of success in their communication because they can appropriately " read the situation" and, for instance, know when to use humor to reduce the tension (Perrewй et al. 117).

The Features of Spoken Political Speeches and their Gradual Changes

The feature that prevails in spoken political discourse - especially with regards to the fact that it is otherwise used in the written one - is relatively high degree of formality. It is then just logical that formality is usually accompanied with more polite forms and higher degree of impersonality; such discourse is characterized with the choice of specific vocabulary and syntactic structures as well (Dontcheva-Navrбtilovб; Ch. 7). Examples of such speech are shown in the Practical part of this thesis; nevertheless, as it is explained later, there are some tendencies to bring political speech nearer to the everyday discourse and that is why political speeches have been becoming more informal and personal.