Aristotle believed that the production of meaning is fundamentally a rhetorical process. He objected to the common definition of rhetoric as the art of persuasion: its “function is not persuasion,” he insisted, “… [but] rather the detection of the persuasive aspects of each matter.” The stylistic questions to which professional orators devoted themselves were secondary, in his view. Rhetorical skill, he concluded, does not exert its effects by changing listeners' minds. Rather, rhetoric has its greatest impact by defining the situation in such a fashion as to make the speaker's conclusions seem naturally right, so that the listener feels that she has discovered for herself something that should have been obvious all along. In other words, Aristotle conceived of rhetoric as a tool for producing common sense.

However, how particular narratives become dominant, triumphing over their competitors on the field of narrative play, is not well understood. Dominant narratives are not the straightforward product either of events or of the desires of powerful interests and individuals. Aristotle alerted us to what actors say and how they say it and to what effects their articulations produce. In an astute study, Bruce Lincoln suggests that authority is located in “the conjuncture of the right speaker, the right speech and delivery, the right staging and props, the right time and place, and an audience whose historically and culturally conditioned expectations establish the parameters of what is judged ‘right’ in all these instances.” According to Lincoln, that conjuncture is so contextually contingent that specifying any general features is impossible. And he is of course right in a way: there are no rhetorical surefire winners that always strike one's opponents dumb, and there can be no theory of dominant narratives that generates point predictions extending across all time and space. But that does not mean that we cannot identify at least some conjunctural elements that transcend the episode.

This chapter develops a theory of narrative dominance, focusing on the interplay of text, context, and authority. It begins by unpacking two concepts: narrative situation (context) and rhetorical mode (text). It then sets these ideal-types into motion to generate four distinct political dynamics. Not all participants in public debate, however, are equally socially empowered (authority), which affects both how they speak and how audiences respond.