Politicization and depoliticization are high-level strategies or ‘macro-strategies’; so are legitimation and delegitimation. Strategies combine goals and means, and these macro-strategies are both means for achieving oligarchic or democratic goals (e.g. governing with minimal interference from political divisions, or pushing political differences into the public sphere), and goals in their own right associated with further strategies as means. We can identify strategies for (de) politicization and (de)legitimation – for instance, ‘authorization’ and ‘rationalization’ have been suggested as legitimation strategies (Van Leeuwen, 2007; Van Leeuwen and Wodak, 1999). All of these are political strategies, not semiotic (or’discourse’) strategis, though they are generally realized semiotically.