ABSTRACT
Depoliticisation has recently emerged as an important concept for critically analysing the effect of contemporary elite discourses on declining levels of public participation in politics (Marsh & Fawcett 2014). Analysts have argued that neo-liberal discourses, in particular those surrounding globalisation, the efficiency of markets over state service provision, and the self-interested nature of public figures, have effectively led to public disengagement (Stoker 2006; Hay 2007). This is because they ‘shift the political character of decision making’ (Burnham 2001), shaping people's preferences by making otherwise contestable policy agendas appear inevitable, natural or simple matters of ‘fate’ (Gamble 2000). If the public cannot see why engaging with politics would concretely change anything – how it would enable them to exercise their political agency (Jenkins 2011) – they will understandably disengage from voting for, and joining, political parties, institutions at the heart of liberal democratic governance. 1 Recently, Wood and Flinders (2014) have suggested the concept of ‘discursive depoliticisation’ to highlight aspects of this process involving the linguistic or rhetorical ‘denial’ of politics. A number of questions, however, remain unanswered: how and in what particular ways do discourses ‘deny’ the political character of decision-making; which logics within these particular discourses make politics appear absent; and what is being ‘denied’ in the act of ‘denying’ politics? This chapter argues that answering these questions requires integration of the concept of discursive depoliticisation within existing frameworks of discourse analysis, which to date has not happened, despite obvious theoretical links.
