Papers
"Global" Discourses of Democracy and an English City
Journal of Language and Politics 7:3 (2008), 413-430.
In many contemporary polities, democracy is portrayed as a universal good, a democratic ideal appears to be spreading globally, its practice burgeoning; it seems to be appearing for the first time in some places and deepening in established democracies. Yet, when one looks for the concrete touch of democracy in one’s own activities, groups, communities and nation it becomes elusive. I discuss this apparent contradiction in relation to discourse and a new “Area Forum” in the English city of Preston. The categories of ‘global’ and ‘local’, ‘identity’ and ‘branding’ prove useful in discussing the contradiction as situated in the English context. I suggest that this problem of democracy may be understood in terms of the ideological concept of ‘democratism’: the assumption that the status quo in England is unproblematically democratic whilst discursively closing off the possibility of genuine democratic progress.
Like (1)Citizen Participation and Neighbourhood Governance: Analysing Democratic Practice
Local Government Studies, vol. 35, No., 387-400, August 2009
From the late 1990s the New Labour government implemented changes to local government and, within the context of a discourse of ‘democratic renewal’, also introduced neighbourhood-based participatory Forums. In this paper, a framework is set out for analysing the democratic effectiveness of Area Forums. This framework sees Area Forums as novel social practice entailing interaction and assesses them against normative characteristics for an effective democratic public sphere; the analysis is applied to a case study of Area Forums in a small English city and finds them lacking in this respect. Aspects of Area Forums may even present barriers to effective participation.
Critical Discourse Analysis in Political Studies: an illustrative analysis of the ‘empowerment’ agenda
Politics (forthcoming 2010), 30(2)
In the first sections of this article I give a simple and general account of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and how it might contribute to the theoretical and methodological repertoire of political studies through its discourse-dialectical theory of how discourse figures as an aspect of social practices without reducing those practices to discourse. In the final section I give a short illustrative example of how a CDA approach to detailed textual analysis might also be applied to specific texts (or groups of texts) in the political arena: in the example I take the press release in which the national UK government heralded its recent ‘empowerment’ white paper Communities in Control.
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