حسین خالقیان منصوراباد

  In today's world, the values of society and the methods of supporting them are reflected in legislative criminal policy. Therefore, it is the public criminal policymaker who clarifies what is valuable and how it should be supported. This policymaker, in every historical and spatial context, steps forward based on a specific discourse and perspective to elucidate and analyze the prevailing values in society and how to support them; in such a way that sometimes the policymaker imposes and determines enforceable values in a top-down manner, while at other times, they engage in identifying values and methods of support in a bottom-up manner. In any case, this perspective leaves consequences and implications on the realm of society and criminal policy. Hence, the author aims to understand the prevailing discourse during the years ۱۹۸۷-۱۹۷۸ and ۲۰۱۰-۱۳۹۰ (Shahri calendar) and to conduct a comparative assessment between the two in terms of discourse and its consequences, with a critical and pathological approach. The current research has been developed using qualitative discourse analysis and a combination of Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theory as well as Fairclough's critical discourse analysis. The analysis focuses on the communicative events that occurred in the aforementioned two decades and ultimately concludes that textualism, pragmatism, and rationalism—with their established semantic dimensions—are among the existing discourses; textualism and pragmatism are effective discourses in legislative criminal policymaking. This has led to two adverse outcomes: a lack of external and internal coherence in the realm of society and criminal policy. Keywords: ideology, discourse, discourse analysis, Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theory, Fairclough's critical discourse analysis, legislative criminal policy.