Mapping rhetorical styles in political crisis communication

Crisis communication is inherently rhetorical, as it seeks to persuade audiences to accept interpretations, follow directives, and trust leaders. Studies that apply Aristotle's triad of appeals to character (ethos), emotion (pathos), and reason (logos) for analyzing mechanisms of persuasion in crisis communication offer valuable insights on the individual use of these appeals. Yet the literature still lacks an understanding of how these appeals are combined into distinct rhetorical styles. To address this limitation, this article examines the question of how rhetorical styles can be identified in political crisis communication. It proposes a quantitative approach that uses dictionary-based methods to detect the three appeals and K-means clustering to analyze their co-occurrence. Applied to a dataset of 483 televised press conferences by 300 speakers during the COVID-19 pandemic across ten countries, the analysis identifies four rhetorical styles in political crisis communication: (i) awareness-oriented, (ii) action-oriented, (iii) information-oriented, and (iv) leadership-oriented styles. The approach offers a foundation for comparing rhetorical styles across actors, countries, and crisis phases, and contributes a replicable tool for the study of crisis communication.