”Det har inte fattats några beslut om neddragningar av assistans från regeringens sida” Språkliga strategier för undvikande av skuld i två riksdagsdebatter om LSS-krisen

Sammanfattning: In this thesis the aim is to investigate linguistic strategies of blame avoidance in two parliamentary debates about LSS (The Swedish Act concerning Support for Persons with Certain Functional Impairments). Focus lies upon how representatives from the government parties use linguistic strategies to avoid being made responsible for the many cases of decreased and withdrawn assistance. This is analyzed through four analyses within the discourse analytical frame: • narrative roles, where the analysis focus on how speakers assign the roles of Villain, Hero and Victim in their descriptions of the crisis, • ways of denying, where different types of blame denying in the speeches are recognized, • exclusion of social actors, where the analysis focuses on grammatical constructions of hiding specific social actors, and examines which actions exclusion is combined with, and, • legitimations, where the analysis focus on how the speakers legitimize certain measures thatthe government have or have not done. In combination these four different analyses give av overall depiction of how the government representatives both avoid blame themselves and blame other actors. The results show that the representatives avoid blame foremost by focusing on positive actions the government have made. They put blame on the authorities Försäkringskassan (the Swedish Social Insurance Agency) and Högsta förvaltningsdomstolen (the Supreme Administrative Court), and at the same time they highlight the Swedish democratic system where the government doesn’t have the power to control how the authorities work. There is also a difference between the two debates in that in the first debate, the government representatives place blame on people who they mean have cheated and obtained LSS money that they weren’t entitled to. In the second debate there is almost no mentioning of cheating within LSS.