Political Persona in the Privilege Speeches of Senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago: A Rhetorical Analysis
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Abstract
This qualitative, corpus-assisted rhetorical study examined the rhetorical strategies employed by the late Senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago in her selected privilege speeches to determine how she reconstructed political credibility, shaped public discourse, and projected her public persona as the "Philippine Iron Lady." Guided by Aristotle's Rhetorical Theory and the rhetorical stylistics framework, the study analyzed a purposively selected corpus of ten privilege speeches comprising 63,259 running words, together with 1,500 publicly available netizens' comments from YouTube and Facebook. Corpus-assisted rhetorical analysis was used to identify and manually code recurring rhetorical units according to their dominant persuasive appeals (ethos, pathos, and logos) and stylistic devices, while Braun and Clarke's reflexive thematic analysis was employed to generate themes from both the speeches and audience responses. The findings revealed that ethos (51.61%) and logos (44.09%) predominated over pathos (4.30%), indicating that Santiago primarily relied on credibility and logical reasoning rather than emotional appeal to construct political authority. Audience reception further reflected themes of detrimental effects of corruption, equitable governance, civic engagement, effective leadership, and youth-led progress, demonstrating the continued resonance of her rhetoric in digitally mediated public discourse. The study contributes to rhetorical scholarship by integrating classical rhetorical theory, corpus-assisted discourse analysis, and audience reception within the context of Philippine political communication, offering a replicable framework for examining persuasive political discourse in contemporary digital environments.
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