Accent, Democracy and Representation in Australia

This presentation introduces a project exploring Australian’s attitudes towards politicians’ accents. Linguists have long been interested in how speakers evaluate different accents and the ways in which this may lead to or reinforce discrimination against different groups. For political theorists, accent bias can often hinder the fulfilment of such key democratic values as liberty, equality, inclusivity and reciprocity, as well as the very process of democratic reasoning and the dynamics of political representation. In this project we seek to understand the ways in which accent might (overtly or covertly) shape everyday Australian’s attitudes towards politicians and political candidates, as well as participants’ views on the importance of candidates resembling their constituents. In this talk our focus is on explaining the rationale for the project and our proposed methods for exploring these questions.