Deliberative Democracy and the Power of Polarising Speech

Political polarisation has become a central problem confronting many contemporary democracies. In the USA, for instance, the major parties have become increasingly distant in issue positions and voters increasingly hostile towards opposing partisans. While generating a large literature in political science, such trends have received less attention from normative democratic theorists. Empirical descriptions of polarisation’s causes and consequences are essential to understanding its threats, but just as important is an analysis of how these empirical phenomena relate to core democratic values. This paper contributes to the latter and focuses on the polarising speech of political actors. I argue that such speech aims to create a perception of politics as reducible to a single ‘us vs them’ conflict, and in doing so constructs a dominating frame which limits the reasons citizens can consider. Polarising speech is therefore claimed to represent a non-deliberative exercise of power over citizens and to threaten the core functions of a democratic system. My concern for the discursive dimension of political polarisation differs markedly from current accounts in democratic theory focused on social sorting and group polarisation. Cass Sunstein and Robert Talisse argue polarisation is driven by the increased political isolation of citizens and the tendency of homogeneous groups to become more extreme in their views and attitudes. While producing many valuable insights, I argue that these accounts offer an incomplete diagnosis. By focusing on social sorting in the private and public spheres, and how group polarisation among citizens incentivises polarisation among elected officials, these approaches overlook empirical scholarship which suggests polarisation is often a top-down phenomenon originating with political elites. I therefore argue that a normative assessment of polarisation needs to pay closer attention to the behaviour of elite political actors. Drawing on work in political science, I go on to conceptualise polarisation as a discourse driven process where political entrepreneurs use polarising speech and rhetoric to divide a society into an ‘us vs them’ struggle. With this discursive account in hand, I then turn to an analysis of polarising speech. I first argue that such speech is best understood as a strategic exercise of power in the sense that it aims to shape the reasons which motivate citizens to belief and action. I then argue that what is essential to this shaping is not any one discursive or linguistic technique – such as emotional appeals – but the construction of a polarised frame which reduces politics to a unitary conflict between (normally two) mutually exclusive, internally homogeneous, and irreconcilable groups. An evaluation of polarising speech must therefore consider the impact of such a frame on the individual citizens subjected to it, as well as on the broader deliberative system in which they act. My central claim is that such speech is problematic at both levels because the structure of polarised frames has the dominating tendency of limiting the reasons open to consideration by citizens. I then conclude by drawing out the broader implications of this account for future research on political polarisation within democratic theory.