What Parliamentary Rhetoric Tells Us About Changing Democratic Culture: Antisemitism in Austrian Parliamentary Debate as a Threat to Democracy
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Abstract
The article aims to tease out the relationship between, on the one hand, changing rhetorical strategies for dealing with ‘post-war-tabooed’ antisemitism in the Austrian parliament and, on the other, shifts in democratic culture – that is, the expression of democratic equality in the publicly sayable. Starting from the theoretical assumptions that parliament symbolises democracy tout court and that parliamentarism is a ‘rhetorical condition of democracy’ (Kari Palonen), we seek to explore the nexus between parliamentary rhetoric and democracy in depth. We do so, first, by identifying the successive postwar rhetorical strategies for dealing with antisemitism in their (historical) political context and, second, by delineating how those strategies mark shifting boundaries of the sayable in relation to antisemitism in Austrian postwar parliamentary rhetoric. Third, we show how those strategies and shifts signify transformations of Austrian democratic culture and democracy and that this process has a gendered dimension. Methodologically, we draw on a multidisciplinary mix of qualitative approaches, combining discourse and rhetoric analysis, specialised approaches to the analysis of parliamentary debate, and Conceptual History.
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This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
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26(2)
Page Number / Article Number
141-159
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What Parliamentary Rhetoric Tells Us About Changing Democratic Culture: Antisemitism in Austrian Parliamentary Debate as a Threat to Democracy. 2023: 141-159. https://archive.jpr.org.uk/10.33134/rds.397
