Politicisation as a Speech Act : A Repertoire for Analysing Politicisation in Parliamentary Plenary Debates

Abstract

This chapter analyses the actual speech acts of politicisation among parliamentarians, which also makes it possible to set the current debates among European Union (EU) scholars in a wider context. My aim is to sketch a scheme for distinguishing different aspects of politicisation, referring to concepts of politics (sphere or activity and its specific aspects), to the politicisation of topics or persons, to its time dimensions (past, present, and future), to different activities of politicisation (adversaries, unintended changes, the actors themselves), as well as to opposing evaluations of politicisation. The data set consists of the plenary debates of the UK House of Commons, the (West) German Bundestag, and the European Parliament (EP), in all of which a great variety of both interpretations and evaluations of the speech acts of politicisation can be found.