Deliberative Discourse

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Isabela Fairclough (University of Central Lancashire, School of Journalism, Language and Communication)

Deliberative Discourse1

ABSTRACT

This chapter analyzes the parliamentary debate on university tuition fees that took place in

December 2009. Starting from a view of deliberation as abstract genre, it proposes a framework for

the analysis and the evaluation of argumentation in deliberative activity types. The framework

consists of a deliberation scheme and an attached set of critical questions, designed to increase the

rationality of decision-making in conditions of uncertainty and risk. Integrating a dialectical and

rhetorical perspective, the chapter also indicates how analysis of ‘framing’ can be articulated with

analysis and evaluation of argumentation, e.g. how particular definitions, metaphors and analogies,

intended to sway a potential decision in a preferred way, contribute premises to a deliberative

process. The analysis also indicates how this approach can contribute to the study of argumentation

in institutional contexts: institutions provide agents with reasons for action that are in principle non-

overridable and act as extrinsic constraints on what agents can reasonably do. Finally, the

relationship between normative and explanatory critique in CDA is also briefly addressed.

Introduction

‘Deliberation’ is one of the most frequent keywords in political science journals. A search within the titles, keywords and abstracts of articles published in some of the most influential journals in the field over the last 10 years typically yields dozens of results (e.g. 24 articles in Political Theory). An identical search within Discourse & Society, Discourse Studies and Journal of Language and Politics – yields surprisingly few results: 2, zero and 6 articles, respectively, featuring ‘deliberation’ or ‘deliberative’ in titles, keywords or abstracts. A full text search for these terms produces these results: 32 articles in Journal of Language and Politics, 41 in Discourse & Society, 15 in Discourse Studies, compared to 216 in Political Theory and 114 in British Journal of Political Science since 2005. While, judging by these statistics, discourse analysts appear to be less interested in the study of deliberation, political analysts seem to regard it as the ‘organizing principle of political communication research’, its ‘central organizing theme’(Gastil & Black 2008). On this view, political communication research is a form of deliberation critique, where political and media practices are constantly measured against the deliberative ideal.1

However, neither political theorists nor discourse analysts seem to be aware of the way deliberation is theorized in argumentation theory, as an argumentative genre, nor of how deliberative practice can be systematically evaluated as argumentative activity. This chapter attempts to address this failure of communication across disciplinary divides and provide a framework for the analysis and evaluation of deliberative practice, usable by analysts of political discourse in various disciplines. I will suggest that deliberation fundamentally involves the critical

1 Peer-reviewed chapter draft, to be published in the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse

Analysis, edited by John Flowerdew and John Richardson.

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testing of alternative proposals for action, followed by choice among those proposals that have withstood critical testing, as a basis for decision and action.

In this chapter, I will also integrate analysis and evaluation of argumentation with a CDA perspective (see Kienpointner, this volume, on argumentation theory in CDA), and indicate how a dialectical approach to argumentation can contribute to CDA concerns with ideology and power. For this purpose, I will develop an analysis included in Chapter 6 of Fairclough & Fairclough (2012), of the parliamentary debate on the proposal to increase higher education tuition fees in the UK. I will keep the primary focus on a dialectical approach to argument evaluation ( i.e. one in which the acceptability practical proposals and arguments depends on their capacity for withstanding critical questioning), but I will redefine the argument scheme for deliberation and its associated set of critical questions. I will also reflect on how rhetorical concerns can be integrated into a basically dialectical view by examining how certain considerations were made selectively more salient in the tuition fees debate, including by metaphorical re-definition, so as to attack the opponents’ standpoint more effectively and thus hopefully re-direct the deliberative outcome. I will discuss these aspects under the broad umbrella of ‘framing theory’ (Reese et al. 2001; D’Angelo & Kuypers 2010).

Deliberation from a dialectical and rhetorical perspective

In this chapter I analyze deliberative discourse in the political field, with a narrow focus on parliamentary discourse (arguably, the paradigmatic case of deliberative discourse). Not all deliberative situations are political: people deliberate, either by themselves or together with others, on all sorts of non-political, private issues. The political field, however, is inherently connected with argumentation and deliberation, though this is not to say that all political discourse is argumentative or deliberative. In politics, arguments coexist with narratives, descriptions and explanations (other macro speech-acts), deliberation co-exists with negotiation, adjudication and mediation (other genres), and (in Aristotelian terms) ‘deliberative rhetoric’ co-exists with so-called ‘epideictic (ceremonial) rhetoric’. Politics is inherently connected with argumentation and deliberation because it is oriented to decision-making, but also because the political is an institutional order whose very fabric gives people reasons for acting in particular ways. The rights and obligations that people have in virtue of being part of the political order will figure as premises in their reasoning. Searle (2010) calls such reasons ‘deontic reasons’ (Fairclough & Fairclough 2012, 2013; see also Fairclough forthcoming a).

Politics is about making choices and collective decisions about what action to take in response to a situation. Because of fundamental differences of interests, purposes and values, and different ways of interpreting the situation, making collective decisions is almost invariably an adversarial process in which participants will advocate conflicting lines of action. There is both unreasonable and reasonable disagreement in politics. While unreasonable disagreement can legitimately hold the prospect of disagreement resolution (one party can be expected to retract their standpoint), reasonable disagreement may persist without producing a convergence of views, with apparently ‘good’ arguments being put forward on all sides. This situation is typical of political parties that may advocate different policies in light of legitimate goals and values that are either different (reasonable value pluralism) or fairly similar, but differently weighted or prioritized.

According to Kock (2009, 2013), deliberation over what to do when several reasonable alternatives are possible was the proper domain of Aristotelian rhetoric. For Aristotle, he observes, rhetoric was relevant to those domains where choice among alternatives was involved – the moral, political and legal domains. The fact that in these domains there will almost always be divergent reasonable arguments on any issue opens up a legitimate space for rhetorical argumentation, aimed at changing an audience’s priorities and persuading them to adopt a standpoint that is not the one and only reasonable standpoint they ought to choose. It also opens up a space for trying to make a weak argument, or a worse alternative, look better than it actually is. There is, in other words, a

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legitimate and an illegitimate use of rhetorical argumentation, underlying a commonly-held positive or a negative view of rhetoric (Fairclough & Fairclough 2012: 56-61).

The framework presented here (as in previous work) integrates the rhetorical perspective into the dialectical one. To take a dialectical perspective on argumentation is to view a process of critical questioning as crucial in assessing the reasonableness of a (practical, epistemic or evaluative) standpoint. For example, a practical proposal is unreasonable if critical questioning uncovers critical objections against it, such as unacceptable potential consequences. Consequences, however, can be made to look more or less (un)acceptable by being rhetorically presented in a particular way (the same being true for any other premise or conclusion.) Critical questioning would also ask whether such ways of representing are acceptable. Are particular ways of ‘framing’ a ‘problem’ or a proposal’s alleged consequences rationally acceptable or not?

Deliberation and debate in argumentation theory

Deliberation is an argumentative genre in which practical or pragmatic argumentation is the main argument scheme. Van Eemeren (2010: 138-143) distinguishes among genres, activity types and concrete speech events. A particular parliamentary debate (e.g. the debate that took place on 9 December 2010 in the British Parliament on the proposal to raise tuition fees) instantiates the more abstract category of parliamentary debate as activity type (i.e. a specific genre format), which in turn instantiates the abstract genre of deliberation. Deliberation and debate are thus placed at different levels of abstraction: ‘deliberation’ is an abstract genre, while ‘debate’ is an activity type, instantiated in particular concrete ‘debates’.

The intended outcome of deliberative activity types is a normative-practical conclusion (judgment) that can ground decision and action. For any individual agent, this cognitive outcome can be followed by an intention to act, a decision to act and by the action itself, but does not need to be. Parliamentary debates require more than the minimal outcome of a normative-practical judgment. It is part of their underlying institutional point that they should lead to a decision for action, yet this decision may not be in agreement with the normative judgment arrived at by each and every participant who has been involved in deliberation. This is to say that disagreements among all participants are not necessarily resolved, and the outcome that can be reasonably expected is a collective decision, not a shared (unanimous) normative judgment. From an external perspective, the critic may look at such unresolved disagreement as a legitimate manifestation of reasonable pluralism in weighing and prioritizing values. Interestingly, however, from the perspective of each individual engaged in the debate, disagreement may seem unreasonable to the end, as argumentative opponents will tend to be viewed as being wrong and in possession of unreasonable proposals (proposals leading to unacceptable consequences) (Fairclough & Fairclough 2012: 200-207).

Starting from Walton’s (2006, 2007a) classification of dialogue types (‘persuasion dialogues’, ‘information-seeking dialogues’, ‘inquiry dialogues’, ‘negotiation dialogues’, ‘deliberation dialogues’ and ‘eristic dialogues’), informal logicians have proposed a useful analytical framework for reconstructing ‘deliberative dialogue’, involving eight stages or moves (McBurney et al 2007). The starting point is said to be an open question that expresses a problem to be solved in a particular situation (the Open stage). The open question is followed by a discussion of what goals should be pursued, what constraints on action there might be and what perspectives might be used to evaluate proposals (Inform). Proposals are then made (Propose), jointly discussed and evaluated (Consider), then accepted, rejected or revised (Revise). Finally, an option is recommended (Recommend), accepted or rejected by each participant, and the deliberation dialogue is closed (Confirm, Close). Various activity types will diverge more or less significantly from this normative template. Parliamentary debates do not start from an open question, but seem to begin directly with the Propose stage at which only one proposal (a ‘motion’) is submitted and critically tested.

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Analyzing and evaluating deliberative practice: argument schemes and critical questions

The approach to political discourse developed in Fairclough & Fairclough (2012), drawing on both CDA and argumentation theory, and underlain by a critical rationalist philosophical perspective (Miller 1994), suggests a view of deliberation essentially consisting of the critical testing of alternative proposals for action. The most significant ‘perspective’ in light of which proposals are to be tested is a consequentialist one: would the consequences be acceptable or not? The term ‘consequence’ refers both to the goals (as intended consequences, generated by particular normative sources) and to other foreseeable consequences, intended or unintended (for example, risks). Unacceptable consequences include impacts on goals which should arguably not be undermined (e.g. other agents’ legitimate goals), as well as impacts on arguably non-overridable ‘deontic reasons’ such as rights and obligations (Searle 2010), arising from institutional facts (e.g. moral norms, laws, rules, commitments), which should act as constraints on what agents can reasonably choose to do. This section defines some of the concepts involved in analyzing deliberation and suggests a deliberation scheme and a set of critical questions for the evaluation of deliberative activity types (Fairclough forthcoming a, b).2

Argumentation in deliberative activity types is succinctly represented in Figure 1, a restatement of the scheme proposed in Fairclough & Fairclough 2012, connecting two argument schemes, practical/pragmatic arguments from goals and from consequence. Deliberating agents put forward practical proposals that might help them resolve practical problems and achieve their goals (intended consequences). Deciding to adopt proposal A will be reasonable if the conjecture (hypothesis) that A is the right course of action has been subjected to thorough critical testing in light of all the knowledge available and has withstood all attempts to find critical objections against it. A critical objection is an overriding reason why the action should not be performed, i.e. a reason that has normative priority in the context (or is not overridden by another, stronger reason, in the process of ‘weighing’ reasons). If the proposal withstands critical questioning, then it can be provisionally accepted, subject to rebuttal by critical objections arising at a later stage, or by emerging negative feedback, as the action unfolds.

The centre and right-hand side of Figure 1 represent arguments from goals and positive consequence that can (allegedly) count in favour of the conclusion. The left-hand side represents the argument from negative consequence that can in principle rebut that conclusion, if the consequences are deemed unacceptable (if they are critical objections). However, predicted negative consequences need not constitute critical objections against a proposal. This could be because, should they arise, there is some ‘Plan B’, some ‘mitigating’ or ‘insurance’ (compensation) strategy in place, or because they can be traded off against the positive consequences. In such cases, the conclusion in favour of A may still stand, in spite of counter-considerations. In deliberative activity types, critical testing goes together with a weighing of reasons (as the etymology of the word suggests: libra means ‘scale’, librare means ‘to weigh’) and the final judgment will be made on balance.

Figure 1. Proposal for the structure of practical reasoning in deliberative activity types

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There are three ways of challenging a practical argument: challenging the premises, the conclusion and the inference (Walton 2007b). In the set of questions I suggest below (Table 1), questions CQ1-CQ3 attempt to undermine the premises of the argument from goals, questioning their ‘truth’ or rational acceptability. If it is the case that the acceptability of these premises can be taken for granted, questions CQ4 and CQ5 come in to test the practical proposal (conclusion) itself, and may indicate that it ought to be abandoned. The point of critical questioning is, therefore, first to eliminate the unreasonable proposals from a set of alternatives; secondly, if several reasonable alternatives have survived, to enable non-arbitrary choice amongst them, in light of whatever criteria are relevant in the context (CQ6). All of these critical challenges can themselves be challenged – this is the essence of the dialectical process as a process of open-ended critical dialogue. For example, while the critic may question the reasonableness of a proposal on the grounds of unacceptable consequences, the proponent may claim that the consequences are not unacceptable because they can be successfully mitigated; this claim can in turn be disputed.3

Challenging the rational acceptability (‘truth’) of the premises

(CQ1) Is it true that, in principle, doing A1 ... An can lead to G?

(CQ2) Is it true that the Agent is in circumstances C (as stated or presupposed)? 4

(CQ3) Is it true that the Agent actually has the stated/presupposed motives (goals and underlying normative sources)?

Challenging the reasonableness of the conclusion

(CQ4) Are the intended consequences of doing A1 ... An acceptable? 5

(CQ5) Are the foreseeable unintended consequences (i.e. risks) of doing A1 ... An acceptable? [If not, is there a Plan B, mitigation or insurance strategy in place that can make it reasonable to undertake A1 ... An?]

Challenging the inference

(CQ6) [Among reasonable alternatives,] is An comparatively better in the context?

Table 1. Critical questions for the evaluation of practical proposals

Critical questioning in this format integrates deliberation about means and deliberation about goals within a single recursive procedure. A successful challenge will redirect the deliberative process to some antecedent stage or to the starting point. If the goals or other consequences are unacceptable, then a new practical proposal has to be made and the testing procedure will start again.

The critical examination of the proposal to increase higher education tuition fees: arguments and counter-arguments

The debate on tuition fees that took place in the House of Commons on December 9, 2010 was a critical examination of the proposal (‘higher education motion’) to increase fees to a maximum of

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£9000 a year. (The transcript is publicly available in the Hansard Report 6 and is 45,167 words long). On behalf of the government, as proponent, the Business Secretary (Vince Cable) begins by making the following argument: tuition fees should be increased, in a context of lack of funds (cuts of 25% need to be made in the education budget to help reduce the deficit), in order to ensure a financially sustainable higher education system which maintains high-quality standards of performance and is based on a progressive system of graduate contributions. The proposal has been, he says, critically examined in government (where alternatives have also been examined) and has emerged as ‘the only practical alternative’. The graduate repayment system is ‘progressive’: no up-front fees will be charged, repayment of loans will begin at a certain income threshold (£21,000) and any outstanding debt will be written off after 30 years. The argument in favour of increasing fees has implicitly withstood critical questioning in government, and is now being submitted to Parliament for debate and voting.

During the course of the debate, the opponents of the motion argue that tuition fees should not be increased, primarily on the grounds of unacceptable unintended consequences (CQ5): the proposal will have an unacceptable impact on social mobility. The individual premises which allegedly support it are also challenged. The stated goals and values are said not to be the ‘real’ ones (i.e. there are allegedly covert, ideological goals at stake), and the stated goals will not be achieved (no money will be saved) – the argument fails CQ3 and CQ1 respectively. There is also a strong argument against increasing fees invoking the promise not to increase fees made by the Liberal-Democrats before they were in government, as well as from a commitment to fairness. Commitments create obligations which act as deontic constraints on action; these are in principle non-overridable, which is why disregarding them would be unacceptable (the proposal would fail CQ5).

Having identified the main arguments and main lines of criticism, let us look more closely at how these arguments and critical challenges are formulated linguistically in various ways by the participants. Unacceptable potential consequences are predominantly expressed in terms of the ‘risk that the increased debt will put off poorer people’, or will ‘deter people from poor backgrounds from going to university’ (10 relevant concordance hits for ‘put off’, 19 for ‘deter*’, 49 hits for ‘poor*’ in combination with ‘deter’, ‘put off’, ‘discourage’ and similar contexts). There are other ways of expressing undesirable consequences: 23 hits for ‘impact’ – on budgets, universities, students, the poor; 16 for ‘effect’ – on access, social mobility, students. The supporters of the motion deny that such negative consequences will materialize, on the basis of evidence from the past. (‘The evidence... since fees came in ... shows that... fees supported by loans do not deter poor students from going to university’.) 7

The values of ‘fairness’, ‘progressivity’ and ‘social mobility’ are used as reasons both in arguments for and against the motion. In arguments in favour, they are supposed to be the normative sources – here, legitimate values, institutional commitments and active concerns – underlying the goals. (Briefly, the government has an institutional commitment to fairness, as a collectively recognized value, and is actively motivated by a concern for fairness). In arguments against, they appear as non-overridable values and commitments that the proposal will allegedly affect adversely. (This is to say: the proposal will damage social mobility or will be unfair; this is unacceptable; therefore, the proposal should be rejected). There are 68 relevant occurrences of ‘*fair*’ (including ‘unfair’, ‘fairness’) in arguments that challenge the proposal on the grounds of being unfair, or endorse it on the grounds of being fair. This means either that the proposal allegedly fails CQ5 (the foreseeable consequences will be the opposite of what is arguably intended, i.e. fairness will be negatively affected), or that it successfully withstands CQ5 (there will be no negative impact on fairness). The first passage below is part of an argument against the proposal, the second is part of an argument in favour, advanced respectively by David Blunkett (Labour) and Alok Sharma (Conservative):

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Introducing a £9,000 a year fee on top of cuts in youth and careers services across the country is a deliberate, consistent and unfair attack on young people in our country and their future. That is why it should be rejected. It is not fair to young people and their families, it is not fair to universities, and it is not fair to our country and the future of Britain... The coalition's proposed system is fair. The Institute for Fiscal Studies says that it is more progressive than the current system... It is fair to all taxpayers that students, who will on average earn significantly more than non-graduates in their lifetime, make a contribution to their education after they graduate; it is only fair to ... students and their parents that they do not have to find any money up-front; and it is fair because graduates will pay less per month than they do under the current system.

‘Social mobility’ is another key expression (42 occurrences, in either argumentative or narrative passages, e.g. about how social mobility decreased during Labour governments). In arguments, ‘social mobility’ is used either to refute the proposal, by alleging that the impact on social mobility will be unacceptable (the proposal fails CQ5), or to support it, by alleging that the proposal is fully compatible with a concern for social mobility (it withstands CQ5): raising tuition fees will not deter students from applying. There are also 46 occurrences of ‘access*’ (‘fair access’, ‘improving access’), 37 of ‘participation’ (‘widening participation’) and 42 of ‘progressive’/’progressivity’, mainly in arguments in favour of the proposal, which (thanks to the repayment scheme) is generally thought to be ‘progressive’.

There are numerous attempts to challenge the proposal by arguing that it is not the only alternative, that there are other, more reasonable choices that are being disregarded. One intervention argues that, rather than cutting the budget for education, the government ought to make bankers contribute more to reducing the deficit. Another supports a business education tax, which would allegedly generate £3.9 billion and thus allow tuition fees to be scrapped altogether. A third focuses on taxing the wealthy and pursuing tax evasion: the £6 billion in uncollected tax from Vodafone is said to amount to more than a whole year’s tuition fees. Labour’s own alternative, it is said, would have been a moderate increase (‘a few hundred pounds’), not a trebling of fees.

Overall, there are 21 relevant concordance hits for ‘choice*’ (i.e. referring to the government’s choice of action), 29 for ‘choose’ (‘chose’, ‘chosen’), 19 for ‘option’ (‘opt*’) and 20 for ‘alternative*’, in arguments that either present the increase in tuition fees as the only reasonable alternative, or deny that this is the case (as well as denying that the government ‘had no choice’). According to a Labour MP,

… the Conservatives say that there is no choice: they have to raise fees to make up the funding shortfall. There is a choice, however. They could choose not to cut the funding budget by 80%, and they could choose not to privatise university teaching.

Suggesting that there are other reasonable options, while denying the reasonableness of the proposal that is being debated, suggests that a return to the starting point is desirable (though procedurally impossible in this debate), and other alternatives should be critically tested instead. There are many appeals for more time, asking the Government ‘to row back a little bit, to think again, to delay this decision today and to give proper, grown-up, sensible consideration to all the possible alternatives’. As one Labour MP observes, ‘policy made speedily and on the hoof is not good policy’. In other words, more extended debate is needed for a decision that is not only procedurally legitimate (the result of voting), but legitimate in a more substantive sense (the result of considered deliberation).

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Decision-making, framing and rhetoric

‘Framing’ is an interesting analytical concept, but by all accounts a very confused and ill-defined one. Framing theorists are the first to acknowledge that their field is a ‘fractured paradigm’, with a highly ‘scattered conceptualization’ at its core (Entman 1993: 51). Loosely, framing is said to involve the selective emphasis of a particular perspective or angle on an issue, generating the highly vexing phenomenon of ‘framing effects’, where ‘(often small) changes in the presentation of an issue or an event produce (sometimes large) changes of opinion’ (Chong & Druckman 2007: 104).

I suggest that, whenever decision-making is at stake, framing can be best understood from an argumentative perspective, as a process whereby a particular premise is made more salient or emphasized by the arguer as an overriding consideration that the audience should reason from. A second mechanism is often at work, where the basic premises of the deliberation scheme (goals, consequences, circumstances) can themselves be supported by other premises in the form of rhetorically persuasive definitions, metaphors and analogies, which (via their inherent bias) will potentially shift the conclusion (decision) in favour of a proposal or against it. Figure 2 shows three of the possible locations of such ‘X amounts to Y’, or ‘X is a kind of Y’, or ‘X is like Y’ premises, within the deliberation scheme (see Fairclough & Mădroane forthcoming, for the analysis of an environmental policy debate in these terms, and Fairclough forthcoming a).

Figure 2. ‘Framing’ decisions: the argumentative function of metaphors, analogies and definitions

The alleged consequences of the proposal to increase tuition fees are formulated in various ways by its critics, in order to make clearer to the audience what the proposal (allegedly) amounts to and thus increase the persuasiveness of the counter-argument. The consequences are thereby made selectively more salient, as the allegedly overriding reasons on the basis of which that the audience should decide. The proposal is said to unacceptably ‘move’, ‘shift’ or ‘transfer’ the entire cost of, and responsibility for, education onto the students and away from the state and unacceptably ‘replace’ state funding by private funding (14 relevant expressions in total), impose ‘crippling’ lifelong debt burdens on students (6 occurrences of ‘burden’), ‘destroy the opportunities, hopes and life chances of a whole generation’ (1), ‘demoralise higher education’ (1), and so on. Its consequences are also expressed metaphorically as ‘breaking the partnership’ between state, society and students (3 occurrences), with the state ‘stepping out’ of its obligations; similarly, as damaging the balance between what students, the state and employers ought to contribute to education (8 relevant occurrences of ‘balance’). As one MP puts it, the ‘government have thrown away the scales and are loading the whole cost – not a bigger part, but the whole cost – of a university education on to the

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graduate’. As the example below shows, such consequences (occasionally made even more salient by the use of metaphor) are intended to conclusively reject the proposal:

The essential ingredient of this debate is that we are breaking the partnership between student, state and university. We are saying that the state can step out of the arrangement, and that the arrangement should be entirely between the student and the university. It is my contention that that is unacceptable.

The proposal is also redefined metaphorically 6 times as an ‘attack’ and once as an ‘assault’ (‘an assault on the entire ethos of the British university’), and also as a case of ‘pulling the drawbridge up’ or ‘pulling the ladder away from poorer students’. Such metaphors (in ‘X = Y’ premises) support the premise which says that the consequences are unacceptable, thus feeding into the argument against the proposal (left-hand side of diagram):

Tonight, Opposition Members speak for ordinary working people... and for all those who are outraged by this attack on the ambitions and aspirations of the brightest and best of Britain's next generation. An abstention tonight is not enough. I urge the House to reject these proposals.

Positive consequences can also be made rhetorically more salient, hence potentially overriding. Increasing tuition fees is said to amount to ‘putting power in the hands of students and universities’. On the right-hand side of the diagram, this way of re-framing the consequences (as empowering students) will support the argument in favour.

Challenging the ‘terms of debate’

While most of the debate focuses on whether the proposal survives criticism in light of its impact on publicly recognized, legitimate goals and values, there is also some questioning of the stated premises of the argument from goals. There is one main intervention (by David Blunkett, Labour) which claims that the choice to increase fees is ‘ideological’, not ‘economic’, and two which say that it is ‘political’, not ‘economic’, i.e. it is not motivated by the need to reduce the deficit. According to Blunkett,

The position is very clear: the scheme is designed to change the architecture of higher education in this country. It is ideologically based, not logically based (...) That is a simple fact, and that is why this is a value-laden, ideological issue, not one of rationality, not one of deficit reduction.

The government’s alleged commitment to fairness is also challenged. In other words, the argument, as stated, is a rationalization, or fails CQ3 (the overt reasons are not the real reasons):

Does my hon. Friend agree that it is impossible to explain to students ... that the proposals are fair, when the Government are rowing back on the bankers’ levy? Does that not show what their priorities are for this country?

Beyond this, there is surprisingly little questioning of the stated premises of the proposal, and practically no significant critical engagement with the presuppositions and underlying assumptions of the debate. In some interventions, students are referred to as ‘consumers’ or ‘customers’ (3 times in total), while higher education is referred to as a ‘market’ (12 times), with student choice presented as a fundamental mechanism, yet such representations seem to be presupposed or taken for granted, and are not challenged:

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The proposed changes will be an important step in ensuring that the money follows the student and will go further towards making universities more accountable to students as customers.

There is an overwhelming presence of what we might call, in Fillmorian terms (see FrameNet, n.d.) a ‘commercial transaction frame’. This includes a concern for the quality of the ‘student experience’ (6 concordance hits) in terms of getting ‘value for money’, in a context where some universities are apparently delivering ‘poor service’ and ‘simply pass[ing] the cost on to the consumer – in other words, the student’. It also includes Vince Cable’s suggestion that universities should not ‘defy the principle of operating on a competitive cost basis’, i.e. should not choose to operate ‘like a cartel’, uniformly charging the maximum £9000. On the whole, not surprisingly, the arguments are formulated to a large extent in financial terms, in terms of ‘money’ (54 hits), ‘costs’ (46), ‘paying’ (142 hits for ‘*pay*’), ‘funding’ (113), ‘charging’ (31), ‘spending’ (15) , ‘investment’ (18), ‘interest’ (10 hits in the relevant sense), and ‘debt’ (42). There are only three interventions that refer to the undesirability of ‘privatising’ education, but this is understood only in terms of replacing public funding by self-funding.

The most interesting challenge to the premises of the argument, and to the very nature of the disagreement, appears in a handful of interventions (e.g. by John Denham, Labour, below) that try to redefine what is really at stake in the debate. What is at stake, allegedly, is the very principle of state funded education, the balance between what the state and students should contribute:

[T]oday's vote is on a narrow issue – the fee cap. Behind that, however, is the most profound change in university funding since the University Grants Committee was set up in the 1920s. It is the ending of funding for most university degrees. It is a huge burden of debt on graduates. (...) Fees are being trebled simply to reduce the 80% cut in the funding of university teaching, not to raise extra money. Most graduates will be asked not to pay something towards their university education, but to pay the entire cost of their university education. (...) That is what is at stake today.

As Denham goes on to suggest, potential agreement on the progressive nature of the repayment scheme should not obscure the fact that there is (or should be) significant disagreement on whether the state should withdraw so completely from supporting higher education, on whether the system should be altered so radically.

What seems to be suggested in such interventions is that the parliamentary debate is on the wrong issue, and that another, more fundamental debate ought to take place first, in preparation for voting, a debate that would challenge premises and assumptions that are here taken for granted. This debate would presumably challenge the ‘problematization’ of the situation and the stated goals, suggest other legitimate goals and explore alternative proposals. This would be a case of deliberation over the ends of political action as well as over political alternatives, which cannot technically occur here, yet whose need is suggested repeatedly. The general lines of Browne Review, commissioned by Labour in 2009 to ‘prepare the way for an increase in tuition fees’ (as Cable announces right from the beginning), are taken for granted in this debate, and not questioned. There are 41 references to the Browne Review, none of which takes issue with its recommendations.

To conclude, apart from a few tangential remarks (e.g. on the mistaken belief ‘that subjects have no value unless they have a value in the marketplace’), there was no substantive critique of a number of assumptions: that students are rational consumers; that universities are businesses (commercial enterprises) selling services; that education is a market in which the only way to improve quality is to operate according to laws of supply and demand; that making students pay will create more choice, more accountability and drive up quality. The ‘terms of debate’ (see Norman Fairclough’s chapter in this volume) were not questioned, while (sadly) a huge amount of time was spent on arguing from consequences which have, for the most part, not materialized (e.g. student numbers have not gone down). Some predicted consequences have materialized, though: practically

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all universities in England have rushed to charge the maximum amount8, and it is also likely that more debt than originally anticipated will never be paid off, which cancels out the financial benefits of increasing fees, as was predicted by those who argued that ‘the policy does not make economic sense’. The benefit seems to be mainly on paper: from an accounting perspective, repayable loans are not categorized as state spending, which makes it possible to disguise the actual increase in government borrowing and public sector net debt (McGettigan 2013: 2).

A growing literature on these recent changes to higher education, including Collini (2012) and McGettigan (2013), challenges the (neoliberal) assumptions above and frames its critique in terms which are very different from those in which the parliamentary debate was cast. For Collini (2012, Chapter 7), the analogies between universities and businesses, students and consumers, are spurious. One shared premise of this critique is that austerity provided the pretext for a covert privatisation agenda, intended to open up higher education to private equity and commercial companies that will distribute profits to shareholders and owners. Another is that ‘as we creep towards a corporatized marketplace’, and as government funding for education disappears, so will public accountability, democratic governance and the protection of the public interest (McGettigan 2013: 2-3, 152-54). One cannot help feeling therefore that the December 2010 debate missed the main point of the proposed changes, in spite of those few interventions (Blunkett, Denham) that warned about the bigger agenda that was arguably involved. Nobody thought of exploring what ‘privatisation’ might involve, beyond the replacement of public funding by self-funding. For example, how it might open the way for profit-making private education providers (operating on the back of taxpayer-funded loans), or lead to alterations to the original terms of the loan (including the possible sale of the so-called student loan book). More significantly, nobody challenged the proposal in terms of the potential erosion of the public, democratic accountability of universities in the corporate management structures of the future, nor in terms of the fundamental adulteration of the education process that might result from putting a financial transaction at the heart of the lecturer-student relationship.

Conclusion

The approach to CDA I have presented above (and in Fairclough & Fairclough 2012) views analysis of action and genres as having primacy over analysis of ‘representations’ and ‘discourses.’ ‘Representations’ (e.g. of proposed reform as an ‘attack’ on young people) are critically significant insofar as they support particular lines of action, by entering (as constituents of premises) in agents’ arguments about what to do. The agency-structure dialectic manifests itself in the way discourses provide agents with particular reasons for action (beliefs, goals, values).

The analysis has shown how a particular policy proposal was defended and challenged in a dialectical process of critical questioning designed to lead to decision and action. In particular, it has shown how various rhetorically effective representations of what the proposal would allegedly amount to were used in arguments designed to support or refute it, as part of the deliberating agents’ plan of action. In so doing, the analysis has tried to illustrate how normative critique (both by participants and by analysts as critics) can proceed in a systematic manner, while also indicating that not all the possibilities for questioning that are in principle available were used effectively, at least not on this particular occasion.

Given the actual balance of political forces in Parliament, it is impossible to know whether the outcome would have been different, if deliberation had been more extended. It is a fact that MPs usually vote according to the party whip. However, this is not the result of some non-overridable institutional fact: it is possible for MPs to ‘rebel’ or to ‘defy the whip’, without losing their MP status. In the tuition fees debate, 21 Liberal-Democrats and 6 Conservatives voted against the motion (with three resigning from ministerial positions in order to do so), which reduced the government’s Commons majority from 83 to 21. There were finally 323 votes in favour and 302

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against (BBC 2009). The increase in fees was therefore not a foregone conclusion, and the attempts to argumentatively direct the outcome in another direction were not by definition futile. In studying argumentation in institutional contexts, what agents may be disinclined or unwilling to do must not be confused with what is institutionally disallowed or impossible, in virtue of whatever (desire-independent, extrinsic) deontic constraints on decision-making might operate (i.e. obligations arising from regulative or constitutive rules).

The conclusions of normative critique can open the way for explanatory critique of why, in this case, the debate failed to properly address a number of relevant issues (e.g. why it failed to imagine the consequences of ‘privatisation’ beyond the impact on social mobility), or why the critical challenges were not more effective in changing the outcome or redirecting the debate to the ‘real issues’. Some of these causes may be addressed in terms of ideology and power, for example in terms of the existence of a broad cross-party neoliberal consensus over the ‘terms of debate’ (‘universities as businesses’, ‘students as customers’) and of a government majority in Parliament, but also in terms of institutional, procedural constraints (e.g. on what can be subject for debate and what can’t, given a specific ‘motion’). It has also been suggested that the December 2010 ‘snap vote’ was a ‘tactical means to curtail debate both inside and outside Parliament’ (McGettigan 2013: 5-6), part of a deliberate and illegitimate strategy to prevent extensive discussion. Explanatory critique of why this particular debate was in many ways limited and inefficient would thus be articulated with normative critique of deliberation.

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Notes 1 In spite of the scarcity of journal articles in CDA, there are several edited volumes and monograph chapters

that focus on deliberative activity types: Chilton (2004), Reisigl & Wodak (2001), Wodak (2009), van Dijk and Wodak (2000). Outside CDA, Ilie (2003) has developed a pragma-rhetorical approach to parliamentary discourse. A pragmatic perspective underlies a few edited volumes: Bayley (2004), Ilie (2010) and a special issue of Journal of Pragmatics (Ilie 2010) on parliamentary debate. Over the last decades, the main theoretical contributions to the linguistic study of deliberation have come from argumentation theory. Pragma-dialecticians have focused on the way in which argumentation in deliberative activity types is shaped by ‘institutional preconditions’ or ‘extrinsic constraints’ – see van Eemeren (2010), van Eemeren & Garssen (2010) and a special issue of the Journal of Argumentation in Context, edited by Lewinski and Mohammed (2013), including Garssen (2013) and Mohammed (2013). Several deliberative activity types have been investigated to date: Prime Minister’s Question Time (Mohammed 2009), parliamentary debate (Ihnen Jory 2012), political interviews (Andone 2013).

2 Underlying this discussion is a (fallibilist) critical notion of reasonableness or rational acceptability. A

standpoint is (tentatively) acceptable if it withstands the most testing criticism directed against it in light of all the knowledge available to the critics. 3 Testing typically begins with CQ4, unless there are reasons to challenge the (presupposed) acceptability of

the premises. 4 E.g., the ‘problem’ and any constraints are as stated, the agent is capable of performing the action, etc.

5 These include the goals and other intended (e.g. planned) impacts.

6 Hansard, 9 December 2010, Column 540 -629, at

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmhansrd/cm101209/debtext/101209-0002.htm. 7 I have used Antconc (Anthony 2014), a corpus analysis toolkit for concordancing and text analysis.

8 According to the Complete University Guide, at http://www.thecompleteuniversityguide.co.uk/.