How do parties communicate about controversial international partners when electoral responsiveness conflicts with governing responsibility? While existing work focuses on policy outputs, this paper shifts attention to elite communication, building on Malet & Thiébaut’s (2024) concept of “silent responsiveness” to introduce “silent responsibility”: strategic avoidance of communication driven by international constraints.
We undertake a comparative analysis of Australia and the United Kingdom, using datasets of both MPs’ e-newsletters and parliamentary speech (Hansard). We distinguish between references to the US alliance broadly (e.g. USA, United States, AUKUS/ANZUS,) and explicit references to President Trump, allowing us to separate general alliance mentions from mentions with a polarising leader.
Initial analysis of the Australian case reveals a striking asymmetry. The Greens were the most frequent to mentioned Trump - almost a quarter of their e-newsletters mentioned him (31 out of 130), compared on around 5% of coalition newsletters (36 out of 763). However, the ALP (strategically?) ignored him – with only 0.3% of e-newsletter mentioning him (2 out of 579). This pattern is broadly replicated in parliamentary speech: only 0.4% of ALP speeches mention Trump, compared to 1% of coalition speeches and 9.4% of Greens speeches.
We argue that this reflects silent responsibility. Faced with a pro-alliance consensus but a Trump-sceptical electorate, governing parties avoid direct engagement rather than adopting clear positions. More broadly, the findings show that parties may resolve the responsiveness–responsibility dilemma not through positioning, but through selective silence, making absence itself a meaningful form of political communication.
