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In:Let's talk politics: New essays on deliberative rhetoric
Edited by Hilde Van Belle, Kris Rutten, Paul Gillaerts, Dorien Van De Mieroop and Baldwin Van Gorp
[Argumentation in Context 6] 2014
► pp. 185–204

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Learning to differ

Transforming parliament through argument and debate in Poland post-1989

Published online: 30 April 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/aic.6.11orn
The essay describes how Polish members of parliament (MPs) reinvented the institution of parliament (conceived of in its essentially discursive character as parleyment) in the course of the political transition of 1989. The reinvention of “parliamentary democracy” and deliberation in the chamber involved four interrelated developments: rearticulation of the “people” and thereby providing new basis for parliamentary “representation” and for the rhetorical agency of MPs; redefinition and rearticulation of the relationship between parliament and other organs of state power, especially government; emergence of deliberation through the dialectic between identification and division; and refunctionalization of verbal and non-verbal behaviors to enable exercise of MPs’ rhetorical agency in the plural context. The essay suggests a perspective that sees argumentation and debate as both shaped by and constitutive of “institutions,” a perspective that complements the view of argument and debate in interpersonal terms.
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Cited by (3)

Cited by three other publications

Dębowska-Kozłowska, Kamila & Dale Hample
2022. “Agreement Builds and Disagreement Destroys:” How Polish Undergraduates and Graduates Understand Interpersonal Arguing. Argumentation 36:3 ► pp. 365 ff. DOI logo
Nowak, Bartholomäus
2016. Posing Questions without Asking. Zeitschrift für Slawistik 61:1 ► pp. 57 ff. DOI logo
Nowak, Bartholomäus
2019. Impoliteness in parliamentary questions. In Political discourse in Central, Eastern and Balkan Europe [Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture, 84], ► pp. 147 ff. DOI logo

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