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14 homing in on the arguments: the rhetorical construction of subject positions in debates on the danish real estate market Sine Nørholm Just and Jonas Gabrielsen The home is often perceived as the most private of places, a sanctuary, the place to withdraw to from the bustle of the world. However, there exists a historical link between real estate and citizenship. When democratization swept across Western societies, the right to vote was usually connected to owning property (as well as to being a white male); this was, for instance, the case in the U.S. Constitution of 1787 and the Danish constitution of 1849. With universal suffrage, the direct connection between home ownership and citizenship was severed. However, there is still a close bond between the individual’s personal concern about his/her living situation and the public concern about housing policy. How one lives may be a private matter, but it is one that all citizens must deal with, and also a matter of great consequence at the level of society, as the financial crisis of 2008, with its roots in the infamous subprime mortgages, reminds us. A basic distinction between private and public interests and economic and political activities underlies most theories of democracy (Terchek and Conte 2001). Specifically, Habermas (1989) has advocated a strict separation of the market and the public sphere as the basis of well-functioning deliberative democracy. Real estate, however, seems to be an issue on which private and public interests cannot be separated, and developments in the real estate market appear to be closely linked with social and political processes. This leads us to suspect that discussions of real estate transcend the Habermasian separation of the market and the public sphere. Moreover, we believe that this transcendence may mean that participants in these discussions position themselves as both private consumers and public citizens—not one or the other. At the theoretical level, these hypotheses question the underlying notion of the private-public divide as such, and in this chapter we explore rhetorical alternatives to the conception of the public sphere based on this divide. However, our main concern is analytical, focusing on how the interests of consumers and/or citizens are actually enacted in discussions of the real estate market. We propose that how people argue is a good indication of the interests that underwrite their positions, and we suggest that the classical theory of the staseis (plural of the Greek stasis) may provide an adequate tool for the analysis of the relationship between arguments and interests. Thus we seek to discern the positions of private consumers and public citizens as they appear in public discussion by studying the arguments they make, and we use this study as an indication of how private and public attitudes and concerns are interrelated rather than kept apart in actual deliberative encounters concerning real estate. The Investing Public Goes Online—Presentation of Euroinvestor Euroinvestor (www.euroinvestor.dk) is a Danish website dedicated to financial news and analysis. The site contains various elements and services; for instance, it runs constant updates on stock market prices and currency exchange rates, and there are sections dedicated to various types of financial news (stocks, bonds, currencies, etc.) as well as a lifestyle section. Furthermore , Euroinvestor has a rather large section on the housing economy, and as part of this section there is a forum for debate dedicated to the real estate market. The debate in this forum is the object of our analysis. It is a central feature of this debate forum that a new string is often begun with a link to, or a copy-and-paste of, a news article or some other source of information, like the statistics on how many houses are for sale, how many are sold, and the average price. Following the initial post, the debate unfolds as a series of commentaries on the information and/or opinions presented in the link. This feature gives the debate a certain similarity to the discussions in coffeehouses and salons that were central to the rise of democracy in Europe, and in which the media also played a central role as purveyors of information and starting points for discussion. Although the debaters on Euroinvestor do not meet physically, the ways in which discussions on the website typically unfold correspond well with how we imagine coffeehouse debates: characterized by much bickering and abuse but also many reasoned exchanges of facts and arguments, and occasionally interlocutors who enter a...

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