Discourse and Local Democracy

Lancaster PhD Thesis 2006

A new kind of citizen’s forum was introduced in many towns and cities across England and Wales in 2000: Area Forums.  They were introduced in the context of concern for the state of democracy in Britain, and at a time when the Labour Party emphasised the need for improvements to democracy.  I argue that the Area Forums have potential as democratic Forums, but that this potential has been missed in practice.  The failure of this democratic potential is made surprising by the Forums being so closely associated with discussion of improvements to democracy.  I analyse discourses associated with the introduction of Area Forums and with one particular Forum in Preston taken as a case study.  The analytical framework is from CDA (Fairclough, 2003; Wodak 2001), and in particular, van Leeuwen’s (1993; 1995; 1996) approach to representation of Social Actors and Social Action.  The data is taken from the 1997 Labour Party Election Manifesto, a government white paper ‘Modern Local Government’, the ‘Constitution’ of Preston, and from semi-structured interviews with two councillors and two citizens in Preston.  This data is contextualised by field notes taken from participant observation in the Central Area Forum, observation of the Council’s Scrutiny Committee, and reference is also made to a further interview with the Chair of a community group in Preston.  The analysis suggests that there are discursive reasons for the failure in democratic potential: that discourses representing democracy do not meet the criteria set by theorists of democracy, who propose more consistent and demanding models for what would count as democratic.  I argue that these ambiguous discourses may have wider ramifications, suggesting what I call a potential ideology of ‘democratism’, whereby reference to democracy is pervasive yet vague, legitimising the status quo as democratic whilst discursively closing off the possibility of genuine democratic progress.