The affinity between the rally and representative claim-making: evidence from Tanzania

ABSTRACT Studies analyse what politicians communicate at rallies. Yet most do so to determine what politicians communicate at large. Therefore, they implicitly assume that what they communicate at rallies is what they communicate across media. I ask: what is particular to the meanings that politicians, and indeed audience members, make at rallies? I theorise the rally as a media genre, in which those present are simplified into two entities (“speakers”; and “audience”) and those entities engage in an asymmetric, interactive dialogue. I argue that these two features of rally genre facilitate, but do not necessitate, the making of representative claims. I analyse “speaker”-“audience” discourse at rallies in Tanzania. I find that politicians use their speech to make representative claims and craft dialogues with “audience” which induce them to co-declare those claims. Therefore, I find that there is an affinity between the rally and representative claim-making.