Discursive strategies for an ethos of credibility in political debate

Abstract The political scene depends on a relation between social identity and discursive identity. In diverse situations of his/her activity, the politician must build an ethos of credibility, since he/she is always involved in a discursive struggle. In this article, we make a qualitative analysis of the construction of the favorable image of itself through discursive strategies - such as justification, dissimulation and promise - in the televised political debate of the 2016 elections to the position of Mayor of the City of Rio de Janeiro. The confirmed hypothesis is that leading politicians in opinion polls need to articulate these strategies more intensively, especially that of justification. In addition, the data led to the identification of another discursive strategy (ingratiation), and the analysis to the conclusion that the candidates construct spaces of agreement only apprehensible by a close observation. The theoretical contribution of the study is the Semiolinguistic Theory by Charaudeau (2006a, 2006b, 2010, 2011 and 2016).