Ruben Ros on the shaping and meaning-making of (anti-politics) in the House of Representatives

On Tuesday 10 March, Ruben Ros was a guest at the RICH research group The Eighties: Austerity, Reform, Conflict. As a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of History and Art History at Utrecht University, his work includes conceptual-historical research: an approach he also applied in his thesis on technocratic politics which he defended last year at Leiden University. At the meeting, Ros spoke about how 'the political' became subject to structural change in the political debate of the 1980s, emphasising the shaping and meaning-making of (anti-)politics.

Ros showed that he used language models to identify trends in word and language use in parlementary debates. For instance, the 'thinking in decades' became characteristic for politics in the 1980s: the 70s were used by CDA and VVD politicians as a rhetorical and anti-political weapon. The spirit of the 80s was invoked as political leverage in order to generate support for one's own policy.

The renewed emphasis on the concept of 'quality' was also one of the changes Ros observed in his analysis of political debate. According to Ros, this key concept of the 1980s was used more frequently not only within the policy-making chambers of the ministries, but also in communication with voters. The concept was of great importance to the 1989 elections, and was even used frequently by the PvdA in their election manifesto with the telling title 'Choose Quality'.

Afterwards, Adriejan van Veen, lecturer in Political History at Radboud University, gave a response. He placed Ros' story in the context of the larger depoliticisation debate. Van Veen, together with German historian Theo Jung, recently published a collection of articles on this subject. Additionally, there was some room for the rest of the attendees to ask Ros questions.

_{Report: Mies Jacobs}