On withholding political voice: An analysis of the political vocabulary of a “nonpolitical” speech community

Abstract

This analysis attempts to identify and explain some underlying rationales for the withholding of citizen voice from the democratic political arena. Of special interest are the ways in which such rationales are located in speakers’ everyday political words and meanings. For support, this analysis examines the political vocabulary of lumber‐industrial workers who claim to know virtually nothing about politics and to detest what little they do know about it. Contrary to scholars who commonly treat those who withhold their voice from the democratic political arena as individual cases, this analysis of the workers’ vocabulary of politics shows the withholding of voice to be an active choice grounded in community‐based meanings that are discursively produced in ongoing interactions within the speech community.