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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 Government's 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.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Isabela Fairclough is Senior Lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire. Her publications focus on the critical analysis of political discourse from the perspective of argumentation theory and include the monograph Political Discourse Analysis (Routledge 2012, with Norman Fairclough), as well as research on transition to liberalism and a market economy in Eastern Europe. E-mail: [email protected]
Notes
1. This paper started as a keynote at a conference entitled The discourse of austerity: Critical analyses of business and economics across disciplines, hosted by Newcastle University in September 2013. I am grateful to the conference organizers and participants, particularly to Darren Kelsey and Majid KhosraviNik, as well as to David Miller, Norman Fairclough, Sheryl Prentice and two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments and suggestions.
2. These were selected with the help of LexisNexis database (except for the Financial Times), using ‘Budget’ and ‘Osborne’ or ‘cut*’ as search terms, from a total of 973 articles (in all UK national newspapers). This corpus was then restricted to 4 national newspapers (461 articles). The Financial Times corpus was compiled separately, using two separate searches in the FT archive, one among ‘articles’, using the pre-defined search terms ‘United Kingdom’, ‘George Osborne’ and the relevant time period, and another one with ‘cut*’ and ‘austerity’, to select other pieces which were not classified as ‘articles’, for example, the July 2010 ‘Austerity Debate’. These two searches yielded a total of 92 articles between the same dates. The analysis was assisted by Antconc, a Corpus Linguistics software (Anthony Citation2014).
3. Argument schemes are basic patterns of human reasoning, empirically derived inferential structures that underlie everyday argumentation. Their structure creates possibilities for critical questioning, in the form of finite sets of critical questions attached to each scheme. These may be actually asked by participants in everyday argumentation or they may not. It is the task of the analyst to bring the normative template of the deliberation scheme to bear on the systematic evaluation of public debate, by asking all the relevant questions that the template makes possible (normative critique), as well as inquiring into why some of these questions are either not asked or answered in a satisfactory manner, if that is the case (explanatory critique). For the distinction between normative and explanatory critique, see the Introduction to Fairclough (Citation2014).
4. There does not seem to be a way of ordering CQ1–CQ3 among themselves; however, CQ4–CQ6 do enable a progressive narrowing down of alternatives.
5. According to Blyth, the ‘opportunistic rebranding’ of private-sector debt as public debt and the attribution of its causes to excessive public spending was ‘the greatest bait and switch in modern history’. The correct explanation was this: ‘Bailing led to debts. Debt led to crisis. Crisis led to austerity’ (Blyth, Citation2013, pp. 73, 231).
6. *Fair* (fair, fairness, unfair, and any other derived forms) is one of the main keywords; there are 99 relevant occurrences of *fair* in The Guardian, 59 in The Daily Telegraph, 31 in The Daily Mail, 31 in the Financial Times and 29 in The Sun. ‘Progressive’ (68 occurrences) and ‘regressive’ (32 occurrences) are used similarly.
7. A concern for fairness is an internal reason, a motive for action. A commitment to fairness, creating an obligation to be fair, is an external reason (part of the circumstances of action, as an institutional constraint) that ought to motivate agents, although it does not always do so. External reasons may be internalized, turned into motives or not, but agents continue to have them as reasons, even when they do not act on them (obligations do not disappear just because we choose to ignore them) (Fairclough & Fairclough, Citation2012, pp. 69–73; see Searle, Citation2010).
8. The lexical items I am looking at (*fair*, pain*, risk*, hit*, ax*, gambl* and bloodbath) all occur with the first 500 keywords of the corpus (out of 8777) and have very high keyness values. Judgements of keyness initially emerged from reading a smaller version of the corpus (250 texts, 50 for each newspaper) in its entirety; these initial impressions were then tested by comparing the keyword list with the Brown corpus keyword list, available on the Antconc website, which was used as reference.
9. ‘To frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described’ (Entman, Citation1993, p 52).
10. I am proposing a new view of the framing process, not of frames. Regarding frames, I take the Fillmorian view that they are systems of related concepts – for example, the RISK frame (Fillmore & Atkins, Citation1992), involving an agent, a proposed action, potential harm, intended gains, etc. The argumentative scheme for deliberation can be used to define a DECISION-MAKING frame in Fillmorian terms, involving an agent proposing a course of action amongst possible alternatives, in view of certain goals and values, with potential consequences.
11. In the corpus, negative consequences are expressed in both metaphorical and non-metaphorical terms, for example, verbs such as ‘suffer’ or ‘hit’ and nouns like ‘impact’, ‘effect’, ‘consequence’, ‘burden'. There are 290 relevant occurrences of ‘hit*’ (‘[The Budget will] hit the poorest hardest, while barely inconveniencing the rich’) and 68 of ‘suffer’ (‘the poor will suffer the most from the budget’).
12. Entailment is a logical relation between sentences, where the truth of one requires the truth of the other: if something is a gamble, then it is risky.
13. It is possible to see such arguments from analogy or definition as directly supporting the practical claim via their entailments. However, I am representing them as subordinated to the arguments from positive or negative consequence because this shows more clearly that: (a) it is in virtue of the known effects of ‘gambling’, ‘execution’ or ‘surgery’ that austerity itself becomes acceptable or unacceptable; (b) it is in virtue of the redefinition present in these supporting premises that the consequences can emerge as non-overridable in the process of weighing reasons. This also shows why it is possible to use a metaphorical redefinition of austerity as ‘bloodbath’ in favour of austerity (as in the Sun example): through its entailments, the metaphor will still support the counter-claim (austerity is not the right policy) via the premise which says that the consequences are unacceptable, but the weight of the latter is apparently overridden here by other reasons (the positive consequences).