Chapter 3. How to approach political discourse: Deliberation, agonism and beyond

This chapter delves into the theorization of political discourse and its role in democratic politics. It discusses two main lines of thinking which are deliberative action and the discourse theory (or agonistic pluralism); then, it adopts the critical realist theory of hegemony as the third position to understand the nature of political discourse. It first defines democratic politics as moments of overt conflict and, in so doing, proposes a conflictual understanding of politics. In the second part, it questions if either deliberative action or discourse theory is compatible with the aims of this study and discusses some of their shortcomings. In the last part, the critical realist theory of hegemony (Joseph, 2000) is taken as the basis and the operationalization of it with the analytical tools of critical discourse analysis is proposed. The first line of thinking sees rational deliberation as the core of a democratic political system, it tries to define the rules for ideal communication and proposes a theory of communicative action and discourse ethics to approximate to this ideal condition (Rawls, 1971; Habermas, 1984; Cohen, 1997; Fishkin, 2011), while the second line sees antagonism and dissensus as necessary components of a democracy and therefore adopts a conflict-based understanding of politics (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985; Mouffe, 2000; Rancière, 1998; Arditi, 2007). In the first part, a definition for democratic politics in terms of a conflictual understanding of politics is provided. This will be the key aspect as conflict stands at the centre of the analysis. In the second part, the premises and weaknesses of deliberative action are discussed on the basis of a conflictual understanding of democratic politics. This conceptualization benefits from the agonistic view which is championed by Laclau and Mouffe. Then, it is also questioned whether the discourse theory is compatible for the selected case, although we partly benefit from it in order to show the weaknesses of the deliberative approach. In the third and last part, the critical realist theory of hegemony is discussed and adopted in order to champion the view that the political discourses of the governing party are based on the structural hegemony of neoliberalism and the chance of maintaining the executive power depends on its capacity to sustain a discursive hegemony through the strategic use of language.