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Abstract
This article presents the contribution that critical discourse analysis (CDA) can make to critical policy studies through comparison with two other approaches which also advocate a ‘discursive turn’ in policy studies and that have been discussed in the journal: cultural political economy (CPE), and poststructuralist discourse analysis (PDA). I suggest that there are significant differences between CDA, CPE and PDA in their view of the discursive turn, and that a version of CDA which integrates argumentation theory and analysis with CDA can add significantly to the contributions that CPE and PDA might make to policy analysis. In the Conclusion, I address a suspicion that using argumentation analysis entails a commitment to Habermasian/Rawlsian ‘deliberative democracy,’ suggesting that argumentation analysis is also not only consistent with but also necessary for Gramscian approaches to political and policy analysis, including CPE and PDA.
Notes
1. Isabela Fairclough discusses the approach to argumentation in detail in a forthcoming paper in the journal. I am grateful for Isabela's comments on my paper.
2. The multifaceted character of semiosis is to an extent acknowledged within CPE (especially Sum 2004, 2009), but important consequences that I discuss here are not recognized.
3. Jessop (Citation2009, p. 339) distinguishes four ‘interrelated aspects’ of the contingently possible constructive effects of ‘construals’: ‘semiosis, agency, technologies, and structuration.’ But in a CDA perspective, agency, technologies and structuration all have a partly semiotic character.
4. The proposal to focus policy analysis on practical argumentation is already established in interpretivist policy analysis (see especially Fischer Citation2003, 2007).
5. Isabela Fairclough will discuss in more detail the implications of our approach for CPE in a forthcoming paper.
6. I have only touched on part of Jessop's (2009) discussion of the crisis – he also, for instance, compares different capitalist regimes in terms of their interpretations of and responses to the crisis.
7. The extent of critical questioning in actual deliberation is however variable: sometimes debates are merely over means for achieving goals in existing states of affairs, sometimes debates are also over such goals and states of affairs themselves. This allows us to incorporate both the recontextualization of goals and imaginaries, means, and representations, interpretations and problematizations of states of affairs (as well as the discourses which inform them) within and between lay, social scientific and political/governmental argumentation, and the contestation of them (including ‘problematization of problematizations’).
8. The ‘analyst's model’ for critical evaluation is based upon the critical questions that social actors pose in various contexts, but it systematizes them in accordance with our particular account of the nature and structure of practical argumentation.
9. This view of critique is developed in Fairclough and Fairclough (Citation2012b).
10. The term ‘deliberation’ may give rise to misunderstandings. Any practical argument that involves a ‘weighing’ or evaluation of reasons for or against a proposed action is deliberation. Deliberation is not necessarily democratic, not necessarily oriented to consensus, often dominated by people with power, reasons which have more to do with exercising or maintaining power often have more purchase than ‘the force of the better argument’ (Fairclough and Fairclough 2012a, pp. 13–15).
11. While such Gramscian positions accentuate hegemonic struggle and are opposed to a view of democratic politics as essentially directed to achieving consensus through rational means, this does not exclude a commitment to deliberative democracy as a normative ideal and desirable objective. Democratic politics includes both conflictual and cooperative elements: struggle for and against particular forms of hegemony, and the building of alliances which necessarily involves deliberation oriented to achieving consensus. One element of democratic politics is a search for forms of deliberation that can facilitate the latter which is driven by a normative ideal for deliberative democracy. What is problematic is not a view of democratic politics that includes deliberative democracy as a normative ideal; it is an ideological view that reduces democratic politics to a search for consensus.