This study investigates the motives behind the rhetorical strategies of rejection and acceptance used by John Bright in his four Parliamentary speeches opposing the Crimean War. Kenneth Burke's dramatistic pentad was used to evaluate the four speeches. An examination of the pentad's five elements reveals that Bright had six motives for opposing the war. To achieve his purpose in giving the speeches--to restore peace to England and the world--Bright' used the major rhetorical agencies of rejection and acceptance. Bright's act, his selection of agencies, and his purpose were all definitely influenced by the scene in which they occurred.

Over the years, a variety of methods have been used in order toestimate policy positions for political parties in national parliaments. This papersets out to apply a novel computational method called Wordfish and apply it to aheavily under-researched form of political text, parliamentary speeches.Quantitative studies of this sort are even more rare the case in Sweden in whichquantitative studies on parliamentary speeches is close to non-existent. In anattempt to contribute to fill the gap in literature this study uses scaling techniqueusing word frequencies and to estimate positions of 4 Swedish political partiesalong two dimensions in political space. By observing the estimated movement bythese 4 parties over a 20-year time period one can draw conclusions of theSwedish political space and how it has shifted over time. One can also evaluatethe chosen method on this specific research material, a combination that has notbeen seen before. The results suggest that there is fine tuning that needs to bedone when using Wordfish considering the output was not in line with conventionalwisdom and previous research. The studied did show interesting movementtowards the authoritarian extreme by the two largest parties in Swedish nationalpolitics.