The Conversationalisation of Political Discourse A comparative view Norman Fairclough Anna Mauranen University of Lancaster University of Joensuu 1. Change in political discourse There's a very general perception that politics is currently changing, in transition. In the western world at least how far these changes and perceptions of change spread internationally is not too clear. For many it's a crisis of politics. Some people see it as the political being squeezed out of contemporary social life. Others see it more as a relocation of the political from the empty shells of the political system, towards what some call 'subpolitics', the politics of the new grassroots social movements like the ecologists. The wider aim of work on political discourse we are embarking on together and separately is to bring a specifically discourse analytical perspective to bear on this debate, asking how the order of discourse of politics is changing. In our collaboration we aim to do so contrastively, and in this paper we do so by comparing changes in one particular genre of political discourse from the late 1950s to the 1990s in Britain and Finland: the broadcast political interview. The data we shall draw upon consists of a set of interviews with British and Finnish Prime Ministers during this period. One major problem in this work is delimiting the political. Where does politics end? This is not just the analyst's problem, it's a structural problem of social life. We find it helpful here to use a characterization of politics suggested by David Held: he suggests that politics is the interaction of different societal systems (in his terms: the political system, the social system, and the economy). The nature of politics in different times and places is a matter of how these systems differently interact. This means that the limits of the political are constantly at issue: what is the relationship between the state and civil society?; how politicised is domestic life?; and so forth. It implies that social spaces and practices may become politicised, depoliticised, and repoliticised. For instance, there is a tendency in contemporary societies for certain aspects of government to become depoliticised (Wright 1994), by being reconstrued either as matters for Belgian Journal of Linguistics 11 (1997), 89–119. DOI1010.1075/bjl.11.06fai ISSN 0774–5141 / E-ISSN 1569–9676 © John Benjamins Publishing Company