The use of pronoun 'we' when politicians try to evade from aggressive questions in political debate
What is it about?
Politicians face a lot of aggressive questions in their political debates. They try to avoid answering them directly and shifting the attention to other positive topics instead. However, the electorate will still feel that the politicians hide away from the controversial issues and the politicians have to do something to mend this damage. One of the common strategies is the use of pronoun 'we' to identify themselves with the electorate or the political parties that they belong to. In this way, they shift the responsibilities or the rationales of some controversial actions or proposals that they are taking during the election period.
Why is it important?
There are a lot of election strategies to win the support from the electorate and the pronoun 'we' is the most readily resource that the politicians is easy to deploy when they face the challenges in the election. Unlike metaphors or rhetorical questions, it does not take a lot of effort the politician to use pronoun 'we' to promote themselves or defend their weakness or controversial stance from the aggressive questions. Similarly, the audience also do not need to take a lot of processing effort to conceive the common ground that the policians want to establish with them in the election campaign.