Audience participation in politics: Communicative competence for political communication in contemporary Japan

•This paper focuses on the interactional patterns of Japanese political communication.•Parliamentary interaction in Japan has not been discussed in terms of audience study before.•Periodical re-visits to social interactions in the political domain are important for this point.•Communicative competence for political communication has not been explored in the literature.

This paper closely examines the political communication by the members of Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly. The particular settings analyzed are (1) ’monological’ street speeches; and (2) Assembly (parliamentary) sessions. Each occasion has a distinctive kind of audience, and each audience has a distinctive effect on the emerging discourse. This study examines these two settings with a common concern for addressivity (Bakthin, 1986) across speech contexts.Given the observations made in this study, the paper points out that the traditional understanding of communicative competence cannot explain the depth of integrative relationship among the participants present in a setting. CC must be re-considered as shared, publically own interactional vitality which is engendered “on live” by those present.