Towards a Parliamentary Argumentation Theory. New Theoretical-Methodological Concepts to Think Congress from Deliberative Democracy

Abstract

This article seeks to fill an academic vacancy in the legislative studies: how to interpret the parliamentary argument in the National Congress debates, complementing the studies from the institutionalist approach. So far, most of the research on the Congress in general and in Argentina in particular, has been based on descriptive and quantitative approaches, supported by statistics and the measurement of empirical data, from the perspectives of neo-institutionalism and the rational choice. These approaches have greatly enriched the knowledge of the Congress, but it is necessary to complement them with the theoretical framework of parliamentary argumentation from a qualitative perspective. Part of the explanation of this theoretical vacuum is given by the reality of a Congress where legislative decisions are carried out in non-deliberative spaces and are based on previous agreements that are justified in the speeches and then in the votes.