Fallacious Arguments in a Three-level Game: Discursive Strategies of Irish and Portuguese Executives during the Financial Crisis

In this article, we illustrate the fallacious discursive strategies used by governments in their interaction with trade unions during the financial crisis. We focus on two paradigmatic cases studies, and analyse the discourses used by center-right governments in Portugal and Ireland to convince trade unions to sign agreements that reversed workers’ rights. In both countries, executives played down their room of manoeuvre and thus exaggerated the constraints imposed on them by investors and international actors. In the same line, they also imposed constraints on themselves that were then presented as external demands (‘trajectio in alium argumentum’). Ministers also presented social actors with take-it or leave-it offers that hid the range of options (‘false dilemmas’) and used a discourse of necessity (‘lazy arguments’). Finally, they explicitly threatened actors to unilaterally implement harsher measures in case of non-agreement (‘Ad Baculum argumentum’).