Introduction

This Introduction presents the keywords of the book: discourse, dialogue and political change. It is argued that, as dominant approaches in critical discourse studies focus mainly on social representations, a dialogue-centred discourse approach is needed in order to understand changes in democracies which are basically problems with the quality of the dialogue. It is also argued that populist experiences need to be studied in their own political culture and the Venezuelan case is chosen as an experiment in radical democracy, which transformed a stable representative democracy (1958–98) into a revolution (initiated in 1999), and changed a conflict-avoidance discourse into a conflict-seeking one. The general principles and methodology of cultural discourse studies are presented and also the theoretical foundations of the dialogue-centred approach, which is proposed in this book. It is explained why this book goes beyond foundational critical discourse studies. The organization of the book and a summary of the contents of each chapter are given.