Karel Čada, ANU Centre for European Studies

Larry Saha Seminar Room 2175, Level 2, Haydon-Allen Building, The Australian National University.   

Justification in public discourse is an inevitable part of the process whereby states enforce reductions in the amount of benefits and public services. In this process, policy makers define problems to be solved and attribute values to make their steps publicly acceptable. These qualities are constantly negotiated and to analyze them is essential for understanding the processes how different actors take control of political debates. The pragmatist analysis of regimes of justification (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005; Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006; Thévenot, 2007) have always stressed the centrality of the normative dimension and multiple order in these processes. These issues have grown in importance in light of recent crisis in the EU when the fundamental principles of European social model have been renegotiated. My paper describes the role of category making in justifications on the example political debates in the Czech Republic between 2006 and 2011. At that time, governments tried to promote a cost containment reform of health policy which was based, among other measures, on different reimbursement regimes for different diseases and a reform of social policy restricting benefits and encouraging participation in labor market. More specifically the paper explores the discourses legitimating reforms which can be categorized a shift from a universal access paradigm to an individual responsibility paradigm in terms of a health policy and as a shift from a social exclusion paradigm towards a workfare paradigm in terms of a social policy. Category analysis helps identify the architecture of the argument that underlies policy issues which is not discussed explicitly (Yanow, 2000). The distinctions between categories which emerged in the analyzed discussion can be described by concept of ontological gerrymandering (Woolgar and Pawluch, 1985). In different categories, different issues were raised, different facts were taken for granted and different values were attributed to regulate. These boundaries might act as the glue which binds actors together within particular advocacy coalitions (Sabatier, 1998) promoting particular policies and allow different actors to identify with them.

Biography:

Karel Čada is an Erasmus Mundus doctoral scholar at ANU Centre for European Studies. He is pursuing a PhD degree in sociology at Faculty of Social Sciences at Charles University in Prague. After working for several years as a journalist and a researcher in a commercial company, he decided to return to academia. Since 2007, he has been doing his PhD. in the field of medical sociology. He focuses on construction of pharmaceutical policy in the Czech Republic from both institutional and discourse perspectives. He has also participated in several research projects on social exclusion, inequalities in education and communication of science and he has published articles in these fields.