Debate, Deliberation, Discourse, Rhetoric: A Conceptual Analysis

This paper seeks to analyse the interrelated concepts of debate, deliberation, discourse and rhetoric from the perspective of political contestation. First, it departs from and further develops the concept of debate that is considered as political activity, its paradigmatic form being in parliamentary-style settings (Wiesner, Haapala & Palonen 2017). From it follows that the practices of debate are intrinsically connected to political agency. Second, the idea of deliberation is communication the weighing of different alternatives presented by participants, emerging from the necessity to form a decision. Third, this decision-making involves rhetoric, which is broadly understood as the persuasion of audiences, as well as discourse in terms of hierarchies of argumentation. Through analysing the links between these different concepts, we take into consideration a variety of procedures and practices of political action. The theoretical approach accentuates politics as an activity, focusing on temporal aspects, although it also considers the spatial framework of debate, deliberation, discourse and rhetoric. This is justified from the perspective of debate as a procedure which takes place in a specific context of time-restricted rules and norms set to make debates fair to all participants. Even in the case of debates in a polity, debates themselves are not necessarily political, but the contestation of the activity itself is a way to mark debate in political terms. In other words, it is the act of interpreting something as politics that makes debate a form of political contestation.