When Doxic Becomes Toxic: Bourdieusian Inspirations for Deliberative Policy Analysis

Following the tradition of Bourdieusian sociology, the paper explores how poverty and social exclusion work as practical concepts in policy debates, what they represent, how they relate to each other and what effects they produce. The paper covers the period from the beginning of 2006 to the end of 2015 and it is based upon the analysis of media and policy representations of poverty and social exclusion in the Czech Republic. The final corpus contains a broad range of media genres - news articles, features, interviews with policy makers and practitioners, letters to the editor - and key policy proposals and empirical reports which were identified on the basis of the media search. The data corpus allows me to analyse policy in a multiplicity of communicative forms (Dryzek 2000) within the context of the deliberative system (see Mansbridge 1999). In my analysis, I focus particularly on toxic narratives as accounts that "misrepresent evidence, that acerbically vilify (often vulnerable) segments of the community, and that in the process are deemed by other actors to 'close down' democratic discussion" (Boswell 2015: 315). The paper shows how toxic narratives in the field of Czech social policy are strongly associated with the idiom of exclusionary talk corresponding with the "moral underclass" discourse (Levitas 2005), which assumes that the root of poverty and social exclusion lies in the moral weakness and bad behaviour of the poor. Using Bourdieusian lenses, the paper reflects the way in which toxic narratives stems from a 'doxic practice'. Bourdieu (1990: 68) describes doxa as the 'pre-verbal taking-for-granted' of the world generating practice through the illusion of practical sense. In this respect, both the discourse of moral and cultural deficits and the discourse of individualization of poverty are part of a 'doxic' regime in current social policy reforms in the Czech Republic. The paper is intended to identify possibilities of deliberative policy analysis in strengthening of heterodoxy - "choice-heresy-made possible by existence to competing possibilities and to the explicit critique of the sum of the total of the alternative not chosen that the established order implies" (Bourdieu, 1977: 169) - and reflexive critical practice as important capacities of deliberative systems to protect democratic deliberation against toxic narratives.