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Abstract

With the conceptual controversies revolving around source credibility and considering the crucial role it plays in the realm of political persuasion, this paper examined how President Rodrigo Roa Duterte utilized the three Aristotelian ethos dimensions—competence, trustworthiness, and goodwill—in all his four state of the nation addresses (SONAs) from 2016 to 2019. Specifically, the study, through content analysis, investigated if these components were significantly related. Results revealed that there were significant associations between competence and goodwill and trustworthiness and goodwill. However, there was no significant association between competence and trustworthiness. Apart from offering interesting insights about the rhetoric and persuasive capacity of a populist national leader, the findings, more importantly, provided crucial theoretical implications for the supposed triadic interaction of the aforementioned facets of source credibility in the context of Philippine political communication. At the more practical level, the results of this study urge both scholars and practitioners to reexamine the usual components that are deemed to shape source credibility and consider the possibly changing structure of this factor of persuasion.

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