Narrative and Argumentation in Israel Radio Phone-ins 1 Gonen Hacohen, University of Haifa, Israel 1. Introduction Radio phone-in programs that discuss current events can be considered as part of the public sphere. Habermas (1989) describes the 18 th and 19 th centuries’ public sphere as a place in which citizens without any special interest gathered to discuss public affairs and policies. This discussion, he continues, was rational and critical of the regime. Furthermore, Létourneau (2007) argues that Habermas, in 1972, used Toulmin’s well known model (1958) as the ideal type of a critical discussion. Habermas claims that the classic public sphere ceased to exist due to various changes in the media and in the political realm. Yet, Hutchby (2001) argues that the public sphere continues to exist in radio phone-in programs. In these programs ordinary citizens call in the radio station to talk about public affairs, and therefore it is one of the few arenas in which laymen participate in the public sphere. The American laymen, Eliasoph argues, (1998) avoids discussing political issues. Conversely, the Israeli citizen discusses politics often, though a description of these discussions can be seldom found in academic research. Therefore, my dissertation takes a look at xurrent affairs radio phone-in programs as an arena of public discussion. My goal in this paper is to answer the following question: What structures of interaction are used in exchanges dealing with public affairs on radio phone-in programs in Israel? The structures I will explore are arguments, narratives and hybrids of these two. The conclusion from this exploration is that argumentation is the preferred structure in the programs. 2. Methodology In order to answer what structures are used on Israeli radio phone-ins, I recorded fifty broadcasts of three different radio phone-in programs that are aired on Israel’s two leading public stations. The programs vary both in the time of day they are broadcast and in their length, which range from thirty to fifty minutes. For the present paper, I have fully transcribed and then analyzed 80 interactions, comprising about seven hours of talk. I did not analyze the openings, in which the caller identifies himself or herself and the greetings that follow. I also left out the closing of the interactions. As in mundane interactions (see Schegloff, 1986), so does in radio phone-in interactions, openings and closings are formulaic (see Fitzgerald & Housley, 2002). Therefore the current analysis includes only the main part of the interaction. 3. The structure of the interactions The analysis of the main part of the interactions yielded several categories of interaction based on structural considerations. The analysis is based on the differences between the structures, differences in aspects such as grammar, participation structure etcetera. Argumentative structures can be articulated in the present tense or use the irreal mood, whereas narratives are usually articulated in the past tense. The clusters