Conflict, Co-operation and the Rhetoric of Coalition Government

Constructing conflict and co-operation

Judi Atkins

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780230359673
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137317964
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique européenne

Through a rhetorical analysis, this book explores how the parties in a coalition government create a united public front while preserving their distinct identities. After proposing an original framework based on the 'new rhetoric' of Kenneth Burke, the author charts the path from the inconclusive outcome of the 2010 UK general election and the formation of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition to the dissolution of the partnership in the run-up to May 2015. In doing so, she sheds valuable light on the parties' use of rhetoric to manage the competing dynamics of unity and distinctiveness in the areas of higher education, constitutional reform, the European Union and foreign policy. This unique and highly-accessible analysis will be of interest to a wide audience, including scholars and students of rhetoric, British politics and coalition studies. 

© The Author(s) 2018

Judi AtkinsConflict, Co-operation and the Rhetoric of Coalition GovernmentRhetoric, Politics and Societyhttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-31796-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Rhetoric of Coalition Bargaining

Judi Atkins¹

(1)

Coventry University, Coventry, UK

End Abstract

Bargaining is the motor of coalition politics. Indeed, negotiation takes place across the lifetime of a coalition (Lupia and Strøm 2008: 58), though the literature to date has focused on its role in government formation. During this stage, the prospective partners must, at a minimum, ‘agree on which parties will participate in the government and on the division of cabinet offices. Otherwise, no government could assume office’ (Müller and Strøm 2008: 159). The question of ‘Who gets in?’ has received considerable attention from scholars, many of whom employ game theoretical approaches to predict bargaining outcomes based on the proximity of the parties’ policy preferences (e.g. Axelrod 1970; de Swaan 1973), or to analyse the relation between these preferences and the government that is eventually formed (e.g. Budge and Keman 1990; Laver and Schofield 1998). Other coalition theorists, meanwhile, have modelled the allocation of ministerial positions (‘who gets what?’), linking this to portfolio saliency (e.g. Druckman and Warwick 2005; Bäck et al. 2010) and to the prestige attached to different cabinet posts (e.g. Warwick and Druckman 2001; Druckman and Roberts 2005).

The parties engaged in bargaining to form a coalition face a dilemma between ‘seeking office and seeking votes’ (Narud 1996: 499; see also Laver 1989). In other words, entering into a governing partnership requires compromise, but the parties must also be able to compete for votes on the basis of a distinct programmatic stance (Narud 1996: 520–521). This puzzle corresponds to the unity-distinctiveness dilemma , which confronts the partners during the governance and termination phases of the coalition life cycle. Here, the parties need to work together to govern effectively and present a united public front, while ‘maintain[ing] their political distinctiveness, and hence electoral viability’ (Boston and Bullock 2012: 350). The tension between co-operation and conflict, unity and distinctiveness, thus pervades the ongoing process of coalition bargaining, and it must be managed if agreements with the governing partner are to be formed and maintained. This in turn suggests that inter-party bargaining is more complex than analyses of payoff distribution are able to capture.

Arthur Lupia and Kaare Strøm define bargaining as ‘a process by which actors engage in communication for the purpose of finding a mutually beneficial agreement’ (2008: 59). Yet it is precisely this communicative dimension which is neglected in the model-based studies that constitute much of the scholarship on coalition bargaining. The book begins to redress this lacuna by proposing an analytical framework in which coalition bargaining is conceptualized as a negotiation dialogue¹ between the (prospective) governing partners. This dialogue takes place in conditions of uncertainty, and the parties must choose whether to co-operate, or enter into conflict, with each other based on their understanding of the situation at hand. As argued below, language is both a source of this tension and a means for managing it, so the framework developed here offers a new perspective on the unity-distinctiveness dilemma. The role of communicative interaction is overlooked in the literature, which focuses on the institutional mechanisms for dealing with this challenge (e.g. Boston and Bullock 2012; Hazell and Yong 2012), thereby enabling the book to contribute to a second area of coalition studies.

The core contention of this volume is that rhetoric is key to managing the competing dynamics of unity and distinctiveness that permeate coalition bargaining. It takes as its starting point Kenneth Burke’s theory of rhetoric as identification, which captures the myriad ways in which ‘the members of a group promote social cohesion by acting rhetorically upon themselves and one another’ (1969: xiv). This account supplements and goes beyond the classical notion of rhetoric as persuasion, and so is suitable for analysing the ongoing negotiation dialogue of coalition politics. The chapter begins by laying the theoretical groundwork for this approach. It then distinguishes three forms of identification and division at work within coalition bargaining, namely: ideological, which is concerned with values; instrumental, which is founded on political expediency; and interpersonal, which focuses on the relations between individuals or groups. These modes are considered in turn, and the discussion is illustrated by reference to the coalition negotiations that followed the inconclusive UK general election result in May 2010. The final section of the chapter outlines the guiding assumptions and structure of the book.

Dialogue, Rhetoric and Identification

Through dialogue, agents may identify and define an issue, and eventually develop a shared understanding. This in turn provides a basis for co-ordinated action (Black 2002: 181). There will, of course, be dialogues that do not work, where the participants are unwilling or unable to arrive at a mutually acceptable understanding of the problem at hand (Black 2002: 182). In these situations, the speakers may agree to differ and co-operation does not follow. It is worth noting that dialogue takes place within a context of ambiguity , where meanings are not fixed and situations can be interpreted in a variety of ways (Hajer and Laws 2006) . Consequently, actors must identify the issues at stake before they can begin to address them. This process of selectively emphasizing aspects of a situation can be understood through the concept of the frame. Maarten Hajer and David Laws explain that frames are ‘expressed by individuals, but also rooted in and sustained by social interaction’ (2006: 259). On this view, the ordering of complex realities is relational, a product of language use, and the sharing of a frame both reinforces and perpetuates its interpretation of the issue at hand.

Alternatively, ambiguity may be managed through storylines , ‘narratives on social reality through which elements from many different domains are combined and that provide actors with a set of symbolic references that suggest a common understanding’ (Hajer 1997: 62). For instance, ‘acid rain’ is a storyline that incorporates discursive elements from a range of disciplines, such as physics and philosophy (Hajer 1997: 45–6). By so clustering knowledge, the storyline reduces the discursive complexity of ‘acid rain’ and makes it appear to be a coherent problem. The resultant narrative not only enables the various actors to understand one other but, through repetition, may become the received interpretation of the issue at hand (Hajer 1997: 63). Storylines thus create ‘the possibility of coalition between different actors with different sets of knowledge’ (Black 2002: 188–189), a function we return to below.

One approach to the study of dialogue is discourse analysis, which focuses on the ‘dynamic, often temporally changeable meanings that shape social practices and that are actively transformed across time and space’ (Martin 2014: 11). It also attends to the role of discourses—and indeed storylines —in shaping us as subjects (e.g. as ‘politician’ or ‘protester’) and creating positions from which we can speak (or not). Given that discourse theory operates with a relational ontology, it appears well suited to an investigation of how the participants in a dialogue form an interpretation of an issue, and of ‘what understandings are shared and by whom … [and] which are contested and between whom’ (Black 2002: 196). However, this perspective pays insufficient attention to the questions of why certain frames, discourses and storylines come to be accepted over others, and of how these dominant interpretations are contested, transformed and (perhaps) superseded.² To address them, we need to enter the realm of rhetorical analysis.

Rhetoric is concerned with ‘the study of how, in politics, we come to conceive a situation in a certain way, and of how we may get others to conceive it similarly (such that they may act in concert with us)’ (Finlayson 2006: 544). There are several approaches to rhetorical study³ but, for our purposes, the most relevant is Burke’s theory of language as symbolic action. This theory proceeds from the premise that ‘language reflects, selects, and deflects as a way of shaping the symbol systems that allow us to cope with the world’ (Stob 2008: 139). In other words, it directs our attention to some aspects of a situation over others, and so affords us a means of dealing with ambiguity. This function is captured in the concept of a ‘terministic screen’ , which orders reality according to the principles of continuity and discontinuity (Burke 1966: 50). As Burke put it, there are ‘terms that put things together, and terms that take things apart’ (1966: 49). Crucially, terministic screens—like other ordering devices—may be contested; after all, ‘there can be different screens, each with its ways of directing the attention and shaping the range of observations implicit in the given terminology’ (Burke 1966: 50).

It is through the opposing principles of continuity and discontinuity that ‘A can feel himself [sic] identified with B, or he can think of himself as disasso...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. The Rhetoric of Coalition Bargaining
• 2. The Formation of the Coalition
• 3. Higher Education Policy
• 4. Constitutional Reform
• 5. The European Union
• 6. Foreign Policy
• 7. Coalition Termination: The 2015 General Election Campaign
• 8. The Legacy of the Coalition and Its Lessons for the Future
• Back Matter