ABSTRACT
Depoliticisation has recently emerged as an important concept for critically analysing the effect of contemporary elite discourses on declining levels of public participation in politics. The causes of growing political disaffection and disengagement in Western democracies are manifold. Marketisation is a process involving the growth of ideas that equate political parties with businesses, envisaging them as essentially utility-maximising, non-ideological entities competing in the marketplace of electoral competition for the votes of consumer-citizens. Discourse involves the making of speech acts and their reception by an audience of actors who subjectively interpret, internalize and relay the ideas contained in the speech act to other actors. Discursive depoliticisation focuses on the role of language and ideas to depoliticise certain issues and through this define them as little more than elements of fate. The logics of denial are not exhaustive, but they do provide the most encompassing framework available, drawing from a comprehensive approach to analysing logics.
