Ældreplejen som ny politisk værdikamp: En diskursanalyse af Socialdemokratiets og det Konservative Folkepartis ældrepolitik

Abstract

This thesis examines the political communication by The Social Democratic Party and The Conservative Party in Denmark, with the purpose of examining how the parties try to fixate meaning about the Danish eldercare, and how they are in a hegemonic struggle. Our theoretical basis is based on Ernesto Laclau and Chantel Mouffe’s discourse theory, which is within the scientific theoretical tradition of post-structuralism. Laclau and Mouffe provide an insight into how no phenomena has a locked fixed meaning, but meaning is understood as fluid, which results in discursive conflicts about fixating meaning specifically. We identified a discourse conflict between The Social Democratic Party and The Conservative Party in Denmark about fixating meaning about the Danish eldercare. Both parties have current political projects about changing the Danish eldercare for the better, but they have very different methods and goals. To examine this hegemonic struggle, we have divided our analysis into two sub-analyses. The first sub-analysis focuses on how the two parties articulate about the Danish eldercare, to construct their specific discursive position in the discursive field concerning the Danish eldercare. The second sub-analysis focuses on how the two different discursive positions are in discursive conflict to achieve hegemony about the Danish eldercare. In the thesis discussion we discuss, how political projects need to be universal in today’s political landscape, and we discuss how The Social Democratic Party and The Conservative Party try to achieve support in the Danish population. We conclude that both parties use the “logic of equivalence”, where moments in the discursive positions become interchangeable in confrontation with something threatening. We observe that both parties try to position in difference to the current eldercare and to each other. They construct the current eldercare problematic differently, which results in an agonistic hegemonic conflict between the parties, where the current eldercare is antagonistically excluded. The parties’ relationship is agonistic, because they are in conflict, but they do not exclude the other, but accept each other as legitimate opponents.