Analysing Economic Policy Discourses on Wealth Taxation: Legitimation Strategies, Proximation, Ideologies and Power

Nothing in society happens without the use of language; we shape society by communicating and any type of social action is created and maintained by discourse. A popular politician or party is rarely one that proposes policies that are most beneficial for everybody, but more often than not it is one that has the ability to persuade, that uses effective rhetoric to convince the electorate, which then paves the way towards implementation of economic policies. Exemplary for this phenomenon is the fact that many societies around the world have witnessed a decisive trend towards increasing inequality of income and wealth. Yet, economic policies rarely reflect or address this trend for the benefit of a broader mass of people. Apparently, rather neoliberal economic practices in taxation seem to be widely accepted as common-sense practices, not least because of strong rhetorical and persuasive means used by those who stand for them. With the aim of uncovering some of these discursive and rhetorical practices and the underlying ideologies, we use a critical discursive perspective on economics relations and sketch a framework for the analysis of discourses on economic policy proposals that integrates several existing approaches. In particular, we draw on the concept of legitimation (van Leeuwen, 2007 and others) to argue that discourses on economic policy proposals contain a ‘function in society’ and a ‘function in structure’. In relation to the former, we adopt, among others, the concept of proximation (Kopytowska, 2015) to further develop the ‘function in structure’ and argue that the choice of linguistic resources produces either a ‘presentness’ or a ‘distancing effect’. In relation to the latter, and based on critical economic approaches, we unpack the ‘function in society’ and argue that economic policy proposals are underlain by social and economic beliefs and ideologies that stabilise or question existing power relations in society. Drawing on recent publications (Theine and Rieder, 2019; Rieder and Theine, 2019) and ongoing work, we provide examples on how to empirically apply such a framework to the analysis of economic policy discourses on wealth taxation.