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This article focuses on practical reasoning in political discourse and argues for a better integration of argumentation theory with Critical Discourse Analysis. Political discourse and its specific genres (e.g., deliberation) involve primarily forms of practical reasoning, typically oriented towards finding solutions to problems and deciding on future courses of action.Practical reasoning is a form of inference from cognitive and motivational premises: from what we believe (about the situation or about means-end relations) and what want or desire (our goals and values), leading to a normative judgment (and often a decision) concerning action. We offer an analysis of the main argument in the UK Government's 2008 Pre-Budget Report (HM Treasury, 2008) and suggest how a critical evaluation of the argument from the perspective of a normative theory of argumentation (particularly the informal logic developed by Douglas Walton) can provide the basis for an evaluation in terms of characteristic CDA concerns. We are advancing this analysis as a contribution to CDA, aimed at increasing the rigour and systematicity of its analyses of political discourse and as a contribution to the normative concerns of critical social science.

We argue for a procedural approach to ethical critique in CDA based upon the 'argumentative turn' in CDA advocated in our recent publications. This is not a matter of abandoning substantive critique, or abandoning the long-standing commitment of our version of CDA to critique of domination and of ideology, but of integrating them into a deliberative procedure for critical questioning, from an impartial and unbiased standpoint. The advantage of this position is that it enables us to accentuate ethical criticism and critique in CDA, rather than advocacy and partisanship. The task of critical discourse analysts is to subject argumentation, including their own argumentation, to systematic critical questioning in the spirit of open debate, with no ideological parti-pris.

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. The 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 analyzing 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 'framing' functions in deliberation and decision-making, and how analysis of 'framing' can be integrated with the analysis and evaluation of argumentation.

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