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POLITICAL STUDIES REVIEW: 2013 VOL 11, 336344

doi: 10.1111/1478-9302.12025

Argument, Deliberation, Dialectic and the Nature

of the Political: A CDA Perspective
Isabela Fairclough Norman Fairclough
University of Central Lancashire University of Lancaster

We are grateful to Alan Finlayson, Colin Hay and Stephen Coleman for their challenging
responses to Political Discourse Analysis (PDA) and we hope to give a satisfactory answer to
their main arguments. Both Hay and Finlayson argue that, in focusing on argumentation
and deliberation, we misunderstand the nature of the political. Second, Finlayson thinks
that there is a discontinuity between critical discourse analysis (CDA), in its previous
versions, and our present framework. Third, Finlayson claims that CDAs focus on
representations should not be displaced by a focus on action, that conflict over represen-
tations is fundamental in politics, and a rhetorical (not dialectical) perspective is best suited
to analysing political discourse. Fourth, Coleman argues that important features of political
discourse cannot be addressed by our approach, which should be supplemented by
dramatistic methods.
The Nature of the Political
Why, in our view, is the political inherently connected to (practical) argumentation and
deliberation? Let us briefly recapitulate our position. We conceive of politics in a broadly
Aristotelian way in terms of deliberation on the common good, leading to decision and
action. We also survey various contemporary views formulated in terms of deliberation,
decision making, agency, action, peaceful resolution of conflict and disagreement and the
publicprivate divide. We aim not to provide another definition of the political, but to
enumerate what seems distinctive about it in various strands of political theory. Hay finds
that we unduly privilege argumentation and deliberation among these strands and argues
that to reduce political discourse to practical argumentation has three unfortunate
consequences: it excludes political discourse that is not practical argumentation; it (pre-
sumably artificially) reconstructs informal, non-elite political discourse as argumentative;
and it leads to a nave and idealised conception of democratic deliberation against which
actual public deliberation is evaluated. For Hay,the political is about power, and to define
it in terms of deliberation or argumentation means to narrow down seriously the domain
of political discourse analysis, excluding situations in which power is exercised without
due deliberation.
Let us emphasise that we do not for a moment forget that the political is about power,
and we discuss at length definitions of power (by Steven Lukes and John Searle) in the
political domain. Power, however, remains a nebulous notion, of little analytical use, unless
we can also show how it can be investigated in its discursive dimension. For us, this
involves seeing power as a reason for action in agents practical reasoning.
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Our approach draws on dialectical theories of argumentation, which themselves often

draw on linguistic pragmatics, that is, on theories of verbal action (Searle, 1969). Like
pragma-dialectics (Van Eemeren and Grootendorst, 2004), we see argumentation as a
verbal social activity with an illocutionary and a perlocutionary dimension: people do
things by means of arguing and this activity has effects. Our focus on practical reasoning,
critical questioning and action is coherent with this overall pragmatic and dialectical view.
We draw extensively on John Searles (2010) theory of the construction of the social
world by means of speech acts, which is also a theory of political power and of the
specificity of the political. Thus, starting from the Aristotelian conception, we gradually
move towards a view strongly influenced by Searles conception of institutional reality,
which we use in the analytical chapters of our book.
For Searle (2010, p. 164), all political power is deontic power and is therefore a matter
of rights, obligations, duties, commitments, permissions, authorisations and prohibitions.
These are conferred on individuals and objects in the processes of creating institutional
reality. In the political domain, for example, becoming a citizen or an elected politician
confers rights and obligations on individuals. All institutions enable and constrain human
action, and the point of institutional reality is to create and regulate power relationships:
power flows through institutional reality via deontic powers collectively assigned and
recognised. The essence of the political as an institutional domain is to be found in the
system of deontic reasons that political institutions provide as (desire-independent)
motives for action. Conflict or disagreement in politics can be over the distribution of
social goods, but also over the (re)distribution of deontic powers, for example over who
has the right to decide on matters of common concern. It is in this sense that we see
power as a reason, motivating action, enabling or constraining it.
In the analytical chapters of Political Discourse Analysis we discuss conflicts over per-
ceived violations of existing commitments such as the Liberal Democrats pre-electoral
pledge not to increase tuition fees and the governments perceived failure to act in
accordance with justice in not punishing those responsible for the financial crisis. We
argue that such commitments are regarded as constitutive of the political institutions in
question, of their implicit social contract with citizens. They are deontic reasons that
political actors have, that ought to motivate them. Political actors often go to great lengths
to show they are actually motivated by such reasons, for instance a public commitment to
fairness. Appealing to such reasons can be viewed as a manifestation of political power: the
citizens right to fair treatment and the governments obligation to act fairly are explicitly
recognised as constraints on what the government can do. But deontic reasons can also be
discussed in relation to power in another sense: the power to impose an argument even
when it is not a good one. Online commentators, as citizens (PDA, ch. 5), may exercise
their right to criticise government policy, but the fact that the force of the better
argument is ignored by government and fails to lead to social change is also a manifes-
tation of power. A similar point applies to the debate on austerity (PDA, ch. 4): extensive
deliberation in various institutional settings has not led the government to change its
austerity policies. This may be not because of flaws in the quality of public debate but
because the (possibly better) reasons emerging from that debate are being continuously
overridden by reasons having to do with (political and/or economic) power.
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Colin Hay claims that while all situations of deliberation are political, not all political
situations are deliberative and cannot be defined in terms of deliberation or practical
argumentation. First, in our view, not all deliberative situations are political: people
deliberate (by themselves or together) on all sorts of non-political private issues. We do
not extend the scope of the political as widely as Hay seems to do. For us, a private issue
can become political, but only if individuals engage with it as political actors, that is, as
citizens in possession of rights, not as private individuals. By failing to relate the political
to an institutional order, Hay loses a standard that would stop everything, and therefore
nothing, from being political. Second, the political situations we analyse in the book do
instantiate the genre of deliberation because, in all cases, argumentation is oriented
towards the resolution of differences about what to do, through critical testing of a
practical claim, by attempting to think of reasons that would count against it. We agree
nonetheless that not all political situations are deliberative, but the non-deliberative ones
are not those that Hay suggests. There are examples of negotiation, adjudication or
mediation in politics they are argumentative in nature but distinct from deliberation.
There are other activities (pre-genres, macro-speech acts) besides argumentation in
political discourse (for instance narrative, description and explanation) but they tend to be
subordinated to argumentation because they typically aim to give people reasons for what
to believe and how to act. In a political context, a narrative or explanation about how the
crisis came about would lose its pragmatic point unless it connected ultimately with some
conclusion about what to do. Finally, there are political activity types that fall under
Aristotles class of epideictic (ceremonial) discourse these are also non-deliberative but
are fairly marginal and outside the scope of our book.
These, however, are not the types of non-deliberative situation that Hay has in mind,
namely those in which power is exercised without due deliberation. Obviously, for Hay,
having (or pursuing) power is not a reason for action that enters into reasoning processes,
but somehow a substitute for reasoning. You can either duly deliberate or pursue your
power interests without deliberation. This is wrong, in our view. We develop a view of
power as a reason or motive for action, a reason within deliberative processes, which may often
trump other reasons, but a reason nonetheless. If an agent decides to ignore potential
consequences and to act solely on grounds of having the political power to decide or in
order to further his or her own economic interests, then, however minimally, that agents
action has been preceded by a deliberative process, in which some power-related concern
has overridden other possibly more legitimate concerns. It may not be due deliberation,
but it is still deliberation. Both good and bad arguments are arguments, and deliberation
that would fail normative standards of evaluation is deliberation nonetheless.
To sum up, we have no problem with the claim that power is often exercised without
due deliberation. Power is often exercised without due deliberation, but it is not
exercised without deliberation altogether. This is because to act within the political presup-
poses the existence of certain reasons for action, without which we could not speak about
the political as an institutional order. Whatever other reasons an agent might have, the
political provides them with a set of reasons that they have to take into account, one way
or another, if only to disregard them. To allow considerations that are extraneous to the
political to prevail over citizens rights in decision making is also the outcome of a
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deliberative process, although one that might not stand up to critical examination. To
conclude, the political is a socially constructed institutional order. Its very fabric gives
people reasons for action, that is, deontic reasons. To act within the political means having
to take on board these reasons, whether one is actually motivated by them or by other
reasons in the end.
Hay does not seem to operate with the usual definition of argumentation as an activity
of giving and receiving reasons, of justifying and criticising propositions. If he did, he
would presumably not claim that a focus on argument excludes private informal contexts.
Is argumentation not a pervasive and banal activity in everyday life, as well as in formal
political contexts? As for his examples of formal, elite public political discourse that
cannot be discussed as practical arguments (normative argumentation, moral persuasion,
ideological proselytising, argument by assertion, folk demonisation, name calling), some
clearly can be discussed in terms of practical reasoning (ethics is after all concerned with
what people ought to do; proselytising necessarily involves an attempt to persuade, that is,
change belief and inevitably, on this basis, action), and some are frankly puzzling (how can
an assertion be an argument? What exactly is folk demonisation?). Similarly, for Hay,
deliberation only seems to mean collective and possibly even democratic deliberation: an
agent reasoning with others (maybe in a formal democratic setting) and examining
various alternative options. We do not use deliberation ( just) in this very strong sense; to
allow ones economic interest to prevail over ones duties, in deliberating with oneself
only, is also a form of deliberation.
Hay also criticises our reconstruction of Guardian readers online comments as practical
argumentation, as opposed to analysing them in their own (political) terms, implying that
they are not argumentative. For us, there can be little doubt that they are both argumen-
tative and deliberative. The online debate on bankers bonuses is a good example of the
process of critical examination of an argument (in favour of tolerating inequality) by
asking the critical questions that can be asked in principle about such an argument (e.g.
casting doubt on the acceptability of each premise or on the reasonableness of the
conclusion given its consequences). In the process, participants are also giving reasons in
favour of the opposite conclusion, thus constructing a counter-argument. It is not only an
example of argumentation (as critical discussion or testing of a standpoint) but also of
collective deliberation, of weighing reasons in favour of a conclusion and its opposite so
as to arrive at some normative judgement about what would be good to do, albeit in a
weakly institutionalised context, without clear temporal boundaries and without the link
to collective decision and action that formal deliberative contexts may afford. The
puzzling view that argumentation and deliberation are absent from such informal political
discourse may be explained by the reductive understanding referred to above.
The same applies to the view that neither the pre-Budget speeches of Alistair Darling
nor the speech of Tony Blair should be analysed as practical argumentation and delib-
eration. As we show in chapters 3 and 4 of PDA, these speeches explicitly consider reasons
for and against various courses of action in the attempt to justify a particular course.
Moreover, responses to these speeches in public and parliamentary debate are criticising
the proposals as outcomes of a process that was supposed to test adequately their
reasonableness but failed to do so, for example by indicating probable negative effects that
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ought to have been taken into account. Such speeches are therefore publicly evaluated
against a normative standard for deliberation, which may be idealised, in the sense that
actual practice is often very different, but is hardly nave.
Hay concludes that our approach takes us too far down the path to a narrowly
deliberative and argumentative understanding of political discourse and prevents the
analyst from acknowledging the political moment in all discourse and the discursive
moment in all politics. This is an attractively symmetrical formulation, but what does it
mean? First, we believe that Hay is wrong in identifying a political moment in all
discourse, and we agree instead with Searle, who clearly links the political to the public
sphere and to a particular institutional order. Second, speaking about the discursive
moment in all politics will not take us far as analysts unless we can say a little more than
the obvious fact that politics involves language. What exactly is the generic form of
political discourse, what is the point of politics as a form of human (inter)action, what is
it oriented towards, under what constraints? These are more interesting and less obvious
questions. Hays argument has not convinced us that political discourse is not argumen-
tative, not deliberative, not oriented towards persuasion through which action on the basis
of decision making may be coordinated, or that such features are not useful in differen-
tiating it from other types of discourse such as scientific inquiry or literature.
We have addressed Hays objection starting from Searles view of the nature of the
political. An alternative answer (see our section on legitimation in chapter 3) would start
from a view of the political as the realm of public justification and of critical questioning
of standpoints regarding matters of common concern. Argumentation is precisely the
activity of justifying or criticising standpoints. In a modern democratic state, policies
proposed by government cannot be merely asserted, without giving reasons, that is,
without providing arguments; moreover, these reasons themselves have to withstand
critical examination. We have no space to develop this line of argument here but its
eventual convergence with the previous one should be obvious.

PDA versus CDA?

In our view, PDA contributes to CDAs objective of extending explanatory and normative
critique to discourse. Alan Finlayson portrays it as abandoning the former for the latter,
and rejecting rather than building on CDAs insights into ideological representation.
Finlayson usefully contextualises PDA within controversies over critiques of political
reason, yet does not engage with the treatment of argument evaluation at the heart of our
approach, where critique of reasonableness is clearly articulated with CDA-type critique.
First, it is not just analysts who evaluate argumentation so do participants in delibera-
tion. Our analytical object includes both practical argumentation and its evaluation by
participants: analysts will thus often evaluate evaluations. Analysts may find that a widely
circulated argument does not withstand critical examination, yet seems to go unchal-
lenged; or that an argument widely thought to be unreasonable is not rejected but allowed
to inform policy. In both situations, questions of power, ideology and hegemony arise in
connection with questions of argument reasonableness. Second, the critical questions
match the range of questions that participants can ask in principle, but may not always ask.
Why certain questions are asked and others are not can again be linked to CDA-type
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concerns with ideology and power. Third, standards of reasonableness hold for particular
evaluative practices, they vary between practices and can be argued and fought over.
The possibilities for critical questioning can be viewed as a vehicle for social critique
as well as normative evaluation the two are clearly interconnected. For example,
participants (or analysts) can question whether the context of action is adequately
represented, whether the arguer has provided an adequate understanding of the problem
(including adequate ways of defining, explaining, narrating it). If the representation of the
context or problem cannot withstand criticism, one question for social critique may be
why it is nevertheless advanced and whose interests are served by this. Similarly, in asking
whether the arguer should have considered other goals or values, one is inevitably
connecting with social critique one is asking about other peoples legitimate goals and
values, and thus expanding the deliberative context beyond mere instrumentality. Finally,
the same can be said about deontic reasons that are part of institutional orders: one can
either ask why legitimate reasons are being overridden or one can even attempt to open
these reasons up for critique the rules of the game may themselves be indefensible.
Normative analysis of arguments cannot help but connect with explanatory social critique
via a framework for critical questioning. These may be increasingly critical questions in
a critical social analysis (and CDA) sense, probing for example into (structural) causes of
circumstances and of representations of them, and asking them can amount to practical
critique.
This way of looking at things provides a means of identifying different practices of
evaluation in different contexts (e.g. parliamentary debates or readers online comments),
evaluating particular arguments against the standard of the relevant practice(s), and it
makes available, to participants and analysts, a critique of a particular practice against
standards that are external to that practice, though not to the social practices of the society
in focus. Relating this to Finlaysons account of critique in three traditions, it includes
a Kantian concern with a standard of reasonableness against which arguments can be
assessed, but it also opens up a Wittgensteinian/Skinnerian concern with the contextual
and historical nature of orders of reasonableness as well as accommodating the concern of
the third (Marxist) tradition with normative and explanatory critique and practical
critique.
Finlayson tries to align our framework with these traditions, but we are not ourselves
explicitly positioning ourselves within any of them. Our discussion of the constitutive
deontology of the political may strike Finlayson as neo-Kantian, but for us this is just one
element of the overall picture. Certainly, desire-independent reasons for action are one
category of reasons, and practical conclusions can be evaluated as reasonable or not
depending on how such reasons are taken into account. It does not follow, however, that
action is only reasonable if it is motivated by such external reasons, or that external a priori
standards of reasonableness should always be followed inflexibly, regardless of their con-
sequences. On the contrary, we emphasise how policies are more or less reasonable
depending on the actual consequences they produce, on how they endeavour to take
potential effects into account or achieve a balance among conflicting legitimate concerns.
If this seems eclectic, this is because practical reasoning operates with eclectic reasons:
duties, commitments, desires, interests, consequences, moral-political values and the like.
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Action versus Representation, Rhetoric versus Dialectic

In our view, political disputes can be over representations in premises as well as over
practical conclusions. First, as we show in our discussion of persuasive (including meta-
phorical) definitions as premises (PDA, pp. 925, pp. 1702), their use can be rhetorically
effective because certain claims for action follow more persuasively from certain repre-
sentations of the context of action than from others. If the UK economy is taken to be
analogous with that of a domestic household, then putting an end to borrowing will be
more easily defended. There will, however, always be dialectical constraints on particular
ways of representing reality; in other words, even when a particular audience has been
persuaded, how rationally persuasive is the argument from a normative perspective? Does
the analogy in question really hold?
Finlaysons example involves an implicit explanation: to say that the crisis is one of
government spending is to say that it was caused by government spending. Again, this
representation may be effective rhetorically, but the explanation may be dialectically
questionable. Casting doubt on the way the circumstances are represented will cast doubt
on the conclusion that is drawn on the basis of these representations. So the political
dispute will be transferred from premises to conclusion, and (in our view) this is precisely
because the point of defining, explaining or narrating in political discourse is to figure out
(or make a proposal about) what to do, based on first establishing what the situation is (or
trying to accredit a view of it). To see the dispute as occurring only at the level of the
premises would be to occlude the ultimate rationale or point of politics as a rational
goal-oriented human activity, which is not to arrive at some representation of the
situation as an end in itself, but in view of some practical-normative conclusion. We also
disagree that, once there is agreement on representations, the conclusion follows naturally.
No practical conclusion really follows from the premises: practical arguments are typically
plausible and presumptive in nature, and there is always some known or unknown
unknown that can defeat the move from premises to conclusion.
Finlayson also claims that representations and action should not be separated, because
representations are actions. We think the distinction between representations and actions
should be preserved, that doing so is consistent with a theory of human intentionality in
which beliefs about the world (representations), as well as desires, needs, commitments
and obligations are reasons for action, and no useful analytical purpose is served by
confusing them. One possible strength of our framework is that it accommodates those
aspects of political discourse which are important in Finlaysons view (i.e. ideological
representations) without reducing political discourse to them, but instead showing how
representations connect with action via practical reasoning, and how structures connect
with agency by providing agents with reasons for action.
Our differences may result from different ways of understanding the relationship
between rhetoric and dialectic. While we draw primarily on dialectical theories of
argumentation, Finlayson privileges the rhetorical perspective and seems to connect the
political domain with rhetoric only. The third-party audience is supposedly the crucial
ingredient: a political actors goal is not to persuade his or her opponent (this may be
unlikely anyway) but to win the debate in the eyes of an audience, and to do so he or
she will need to root his or her arguments in premises that will resonate with that
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audience. All this is true and worth emphasising, but we see no reason to abandon
pragma-dialectics own way of acknowledging the arguers double (dialectical and rhe-
torical) goal, nor can we agree that politics is not the realm of dialectic but only of
rhetoric. As our analyses show, arguments in favour of a policy may be rooted in beliefs
and values that the audience has or can be made to accept, but are also designed to
withstand real or anticipated critical questioning from an audience that talks back, in a
process of extended public dialogue and against a background of controversy. For us, it is
not possible to say of a political speech that it is only rhetoric, or that it cannot be
discussed from a dialectical perspective.We take the view that logic, rhetoric and dialectic
are three possible perspectives on any argument, and an argument can be rhetorically strong
but dialectically and logically weak or vice versa.

Discourse and Performance

Stephen Coleman argues that contemporary crises cry out for dramatistic interpretation
of the enactment of crisis as a performed drama, and that such an interpretation cannot
be provided by our framework. He identifies two aspects of political responses to the crisis
that are best illuminated from a dramatistic perspective, embodiment and authenticity:
the embodiment of the people on whose behalf politicians assume the right to make
claims, and the consistency of performance over time, which gives politicians an aura of
authenticity.
In the case of embodiment, Coleman suggests (with respect to the Cameron example
that he uses) that our approach cannot capture the irony in a Conservative leader
attacking the irresponsibly rich while speaking up for the poorest, which affects the
meaning of Camerons speech by both playing upon and disrupting political memory
and enacting ... an apparent capacity for moral adaptability. His point is that such history
cannot be read into the text itself , though it shapes its meaning in these ways, and that
it is therefore beyond our analytical framework. In the case of authenticity, Coleman
suggests that presentations of authenticity ... present a challenge to discourse analysis, for
consistency can only be traced temporally and intertextually rather than through single
speech units. Coleman also notes in more general terms that setting the scene relies not
only on words spoken, but tonal inflections, images, gestures and appeals to memory.
Colemans comments make certain assumptions about our approach that we would
question. For example, our approach can in principle be applied in comparisons between
different arguments over time and also extended to include features of tone, image and
gesture in spoken interaction (CDA addresses the latter aspects under style). Inconsist-
ency (self-contradiction, including over time) is discussed in pragma-dialectics as a
challenge to argument reasonableness, and self-contradiction in a politicians discourse is
therefore wholly amenable to an approach such as ours; so is the common technique
(argumentation by dissociation) used in order to defend oneself against the public
perception of inconsistency, hence inauthenticity.The main point, however, is that we do
not advocate our approach as a replacement for other frameworks for political analysis, but
as a potential contribution to more comprehensive political analysis. We do not presume
to provide everything that a political analyst would need but aim to make a contribution
of a specific and limited sort, with a clear textual focus.
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Conclusion
Naturally, we focus in our book on developing our own particular method, not on
applying other analysts methods. However, we do engage with other methods of dis-
course analysis and also indicate how other theoretical frameworks (e.g. the cognitive
theories of metaphor or framing) can be productively articulated with our approach. In
particular, we want to engage with cultural political economy ( Jessop, 2004), the moral
economy approach (Sayer, 2011) and the argumentative turn in social and political
science (Fischer and Gottweis, 2012). Colin Hay suggests that our focus on argumentation
amounts to a form of methodological absolutism. We admit that we do make a strong
case for focusing on practical argument, but we do so against the background of (what we
see as) the rather astonishing neglect of it in political discourse analysis and its centrality
in politics. One pleasing suggestion in both Finlaysons and Hays responses is that by
setting out our stall strongly, clearly and maybe provocatively, we might be a catalyst for
a much-needed interdisciplinary debate on methodology in the field of political discourse
analysis.
(Accepted: 30 April 2013)
About the Authors
Isabela Fairclough is Senior Lecturer in English in the School of Language, Literature and International Studies
at the University of Central Lancashire. Isabela Fairclough, School of Language, Literature and International Studies,
University of Central Lancashire, Preston, Lancashire PR1 2HE, UK; email: ifairclough@uclan.ac.uk
Norman Fairclough is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at Lancaster University. Norman Fairclough, Department
of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University, Bailrigg, Lancaster LA1 4YL, UK; email: n.fairclough
@lancaster.ac.uk

References
Fairclough, I. and Fairclough, N. (2012) Political Discourse Analysis: A Method for Advanced Students. London: Routledge.
Fischer, F. and Gottweis, H. (2012) The Argumentative Turn Revisited. Durham NC: Duke University Press.
Jessop, B. (2004) Critical Semiotic Analysis and Cultural Political Economy, Critical Discourse Studies, 1 (2), 15974.
Sayer, A. (2011) Why Things Matter to People: Social Science, Values and Ethical Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Searle, J. R. (1969) Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Searle, J. R. (2010) Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Van Eemeren, F. H. and Grootendorst, R. (2004) A Systematic Theory of Argumentation: The Pragma-dialectical Approach.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2013 The Authors. Political Studies Review 2013 Political Studies Association
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