Slogans of the Elected: Rhetoric, Meaning, and Political Identity in the 2025 Philippine Senatorial Elections

Abstract

In the Philippines, electoral politics is shaped by personality, symbolic recognition, and affective communication. Within this context, campaign slogans function as strategic linguistic tools that condense political identity, emotion, and cultural meaning into memorable expressions. While existing studies have examined Philippine political slogans, less attention has been given to the slogans of elected senatorial candidates as a bounded qualitative dataset. Addressing this gap, this study conducts a rhetorical–semantic analysis of the campaign slogans of the twelve elected candidates in the 2025 Philippine senatorial elections. Drawing on Aristotle’s rhetorical appeals, Denton’s framework of rhetorical functions of slogans, and Leech’s framework of associative meaning, the study examines how slogans construct political identity, mobilize affect, and communicate culturally recognizable meanings. Findings show that the slogans are organized mainly around pathos and ethos, while logos appears more selectively in issue-based slogans. The analysis further shows that slogans serve key communicative functions, enabling candidates to appear familiar, trustworthy, caring, or symbolically recognizable. Semantically, the slogans carry layered meanings through idioms, wordplay, family-centered appeals, gendered identity, and digital branding, as seen in Maaasahan ng Pamilyang Pilipino (Someone Filipino families can rely on), Pinay in Action (Filipina in action), and #IMEESolusyon (Imee is the solution). The study argues that senatorial slogans should not be understood as predictors of electoral success, but as rhetorical–semantic artifacts of political self-presentation.