Evaluating policy as argument: the public debate over the first UK austerity budget

Abstract

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.

Reframing obesity: a critical discourse analysis of the UK’s first social marketing campaign

“…Thaler In fact, framing is routinely used in public discourse to re-describe reality in a way that is rhetorically and even ideologically convenient for the arguer (Edelman 1993;Entman and Rojecki 1993) and in doing so presupposes a particular set of social values whose acceptance is required as a condition of 'the communication game' (Lakoff 2004;Macagno and Walton 2010). This is variously realised through argumentation schemes, metaphors, analogy and persuasive definitions (Fairclough 2016). For example, the Catholic Church's opposition to the legalisation of gay marriage largely centres on the word 'marriage' itself.…”

Fear and insecurity in the politics of austerity

“…The third security register focuses on moral fears concerning the vulnerability of particular groups of people and the harm that might befall them. Even though the harm caused to the people who are already in a vulnerable position has been one of the most disputed issues in the politics of austerity (see Clarke & Newman, 2012;Fairclough, 2016;Hitchen, 2014), it has not been conceptualised in terms of the politics of fear. In this register, moral fears and obligations were used as drivers for supporting or opposing austerity.…”

A procedural approach to ethical critique in CDA

“…In a more recent version of this framework (Fairclough, I. 2016(Fairclough, I. , 2018, deliberation is modelled as a critical procedure designed to filter out those practical conclusions (and corresponding decisions) that would not pass the test of critical questioning.…”

“…In our view, the most significant perspective in the light of which proposals are to be tested is a consequentialist one (Fairclough & Fairclough 2012, Fairclough, I. 2016.…”