Isabela Fairclough

Political discourse analysis: A method for advanced students

In this accessible new textbook, Isabela and Norman Fairclough present their innovative approach to analysing political discourse. Political Discourse Analysis integrates analysis of arguments into critical discourse analysis and political discourse analysis. The book is grounded in a view of politics in which deliberation, decision and action are crucial concepts: politics is about arriving cooperatively at decisions about what to do in the context of disagreement, conflict of interests and values, power inequalities, uncertainty and risk. The first half of the book introduces the authors’ new approach to the analysis and evaluation of practical arguments, while the second half explores how it can be applied by looking at examples such as government reports, parliamentary debates, political speeches and online discussion forums on political issues. Through the analysis of current events, including a particular focus on the economic crisis and political responses to it, the authors provide a systematic and rigorous analytical framework that can be adopted and used for students’ own research. This exciting new text, co-written by bestselling author Norman Fairclough, is essential reading for researchers, upper undergraduate and postgraduate students of discourse analysis, within English language, linguistics, communication studies, politics and other social sciences.

Practical reasoning in political discourse: The UK government’s response to the economic crisis in the 2008 Pre-Budget Report

This article focuses on practical reasoning in political discourse and argues for a better integration of argumentation theory with critical discourse analysis (CDA). Political discourse and its specific genres (for example, deliberation) primarily involve forms of practical reasoning, typically oriented towards finding solutions to problems and deciding on future courses of action. Practical reasoning is a form of inference from cognitive and motivational premises: from what we believe (about the situation or about means—end relations) and what we want or desire (our goals and values), leading to a normative judgement (and often a decision) concerning action. We offer an analysis of the main argument in the UK government’s 2008 Pre-Budget Report (HM Treasury, 2008) and suggest how a critical evaluation of the argument from the perspective of a normative theory of argumentation (particularly the informal logic developed by Douglas Walton) can provide the basis for an evaluation in terms of characteristic CDA concerns. We are advancing this analysis as a contribution to CDA, aimed at increasing the rigour and systematicity of its analyses of political discourse, and as a contribution to the normative concerns of critical social science.

Evaluating policy as argument: the public debate over the first UK Austerity Budget

ABSTRACT This article aims to make a methodological contribution to the ‘argumentative turn’ in policy analysis and to the understanding of the public debate on the UK Governments austerity policies. It suggests that policy arguments are practical arguments from circumstances, goals and means–goal relations to practical conclusions (proposals) that can ground decision and action. Practical proposals are evaluated in light of their potential consequences. This article proposes a deliberation scheme and a set of critical questions for the evaluation of deliberation and decision-making in conditions of incomplete knowledge (uncertainty and risk). It illustrates these questions by analysing a corpus of articles from five newspapers over the two months following the adoption of the first austerity budget in June 2010. It also suggests how analysis of ‘frames’ and ‘framing’ can be integrated with the evaluation of deliberation and decision-making.

Argument, Deliberation, Dialectic and the Nature of the Political: A CDA Perspective

We are grateful to Alan Finlayson, Colin Hay and Stephen Coleman for their challenging responses to Political Discourse Analysis (PDA) and we hope to give a satisfactory answer to their main arguments. Both Hay and Finlayson argue that, in focusing on argumentation and deliberation, we misunderstand the nature of the political. Second, Finlayson thinks that there is a discontinuity between critical discourse analysis (CDA), in its previous versions, and our present framework. Third, Finlayson claims that CDAs focus on representations should not be displaced by a focus on action, that conflict over representations is fundamental in politics, and a rhetorical (not dialectical) perspective is best suited to analysing political discourse. Fourth, Coleman argues that important features of political discourse cannot be addressed by our approach, which should be supplemented by ‘dramatistic’ methods.

A procedural approach to ethical critique in CDA

ABSTRACT We argue for a procedural approach to ethical critique in CDA based upon the ‘argumentative turn’ in CDA advocated in our recent publications. This is not a matter of abandoning substantive critique, or abandoning the long-standing commitment of our version of CDA to critique of domination and of ideology, but of integrating them into a deliberative procedure for critical questioning, from an impartial and unbiased standpoint. The advantage of this position is that it enables us to accentuate ethical criticism and critique in CDA, rather than advocacy and partizanship. The task of critical discourse analysts is to subject argumentation, including their own argumentation, to systematic critical questioning in the spirit of open debate, with no ideological parti-pris.