Políticos y ciudadanos: análisis conversacional de la entrevista política

Abstract

Politicians and citizens: conversational analysis of the political interview

In this article we present a comparative analysis of interactions with Spanish politicians within the framework of conversational analysis; in particular, we examine the turn-taking system of the interviews and the different deviations in the question-reply pairs, such as interruptions, overlaps and successive replies. The corpus includes six interviews broadcast at the Spanish television in 2007 and 2009, in a new type of political interview where citizens rather than professional journalists ask the questions. Our findings show that deviations in the question-reply pairs are frequent in the interactions with all politicians, and that they reflect, on the one hand, the assumption of new roles by citizens and politicians; and, on the other, an on-going evolution of the genre to more interactive and dialectic formats.