How Commissives Depend on Representatives: An Illocutionary Analysis of Collective Identity in Zohran Mamdani’s Election Victory Speech

Abstract

Political victory speeches are strategic discursive tools used to build public legitimacy and
construct political identity. This article investigates the linguistic strategies in Zohran
Mamdani’s 2025 mayoral victory speech, focusing on the interplay between representative and
commissive speech acts through John Searle’s pragmatic framework. Employing a descriptive
qualitative method, this study analyzes how the speaker constructs collective agency and aligns
political commitments with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The
findings demonstrate that Mamdani utilizes representative acts as preparatory conditions to
vest political ownership in the collective, which subsequently transforms commissive acts into
collectivized commitments. Furthermore, the analysis reveals a significant alignment between
these policies and SDG targets 11.1, 11.2, 3.8, and 16.5, suggesting that the speech
performatively enacts the participatory governance prescribed by SDG 16.7. This research
contributes to the study of political pragmatics by highlighting the constitutive relationship
between speech acts, providing a framework for analyzing how discourse actively constructs
the collective agency necessary for democratic governance.
Keywords: Sustainable Development Goals, Speech act theory, Illocutionary Act