Speaking to the outraged: discursive responses of policy elites to social unrest over economic issues

ABSTRACT

Communicative discourse is widely understood as consisting of a top-down political dynamic in which policy elites actively construct discourse and convey it to a passive public. Yet, this understanding overlooks instances of a bottom-up dynamic where social unrest puts policy elites in a reactive position. Relying on the literature on depoliticization, I argue that in bottom-up dynamics, policy elites use a different discursive tactic than in top-down dynamics, namely, containment. Using the containment tactic, policy elites accommodate their discourse to engage with public pleas in a manner that reaffirms the ideational framework that currently underlies policymaking, by using two complementary practices: boundary-setting and tailored framing. I illustrate my argument through an analysis of the Israeli policy elite’s public discursive responses to a period of mass protest during 2011. The article concludes by pointing out the rising importance of studying communicative discourse in bottom-up political dynamics.

KEYWORDS:

• Discursive institutionalism
• political economy
• neoliberalism
• depoliticization
• Israel

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Ronen Mandelkern for his critical comments on previous versions of this article and to three anonymous reviewers of Critical Policy Studies for their insightful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Schmidt’s (2014) distinction between speaking to the markets and speaking to the people is concerned with varying audiences rather than with differentiating between economic crisis and social unrest.

2. For an alternative, a less ‘discursive’ and more ‘institutional’ interpretation, see Burnham (2001) and Wood (2016).

3. The only exception was a short-lived counter-neoliberal discourse presented by the head of the Labor party during the 2006 election campaign, which disappeared shortly afterwards.

4. In May 2012, the government opposed a bill that required that the funds generated by this tax would be directed to education, health, and welfare objectives (Additional Tax for Purposes of Education, Health and Welfare Bill, 2012).

5. Hay’s work is a notable exception (Hay and Rosamond, 2002; Watson and Hay, 2003; Hay, 2007).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amit Avigur-Eshel

Amit Avigur-Eshel is an adjunct lecturer at the Department of Political Science, and the Philosophy, Economics and Political Science Program, Hebrew University, Israel. His research interests include depoliticization, economic ideologies and discourses, and popular mobilization. His current research focuses on financial education.