Rhetoric Matters: the Case of Slovak Presidents

The scope of the paper is to explore the rhetoric of Slovak presidents. During last decades there has been an increasing number of literature dealing with institutional performance of the presidential office. But, together with the focus on institutional performance of the presidents it is equally important to look at their rhetoric. Though limited in their constitutional powers, presidents have capacity to influence political discourse and to set political agenda. However, the ability of presidents to bring about the agenda is still unexplored, especially in the context of Central and Eastern European countries. The main objective of the paper is to fill this gap and to look at the rhetoric of Slovak presidents. All of them have been pursuing especially the “social agenda” which became very popular in their rhetoric and have been a crucial part not only of their election campaigns, but also of their performance in the office. The central questions are what do presidents actually mean by their “social agenda”, how do they frame it and how do they pursue it? Together with these questions it is important to look also in the context and to explore if presidents only react to certain political development or if they are also agenda setters able to influence political process. In order to respond these questions the paper uses discourse analysis of the media and official documents of the presidential office (presidential election programmes, pre-election debates, speeches, press releases and interviews).