Reframing Public Policy: Discursive Politics and Deliberative Practices

279 Pages·2003·16.768 MB·English

by  Frank Fischer

REFRAMING PUBLIC POLICY
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Reframing Public Policy
Discursive Politics and Deliberative Practices
FRANK FISCHER
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Preface
Reframing Public Policy brings together and examines the perspectives on public
policy discourse, discursive policy analysis, and deliberative policymaking practices
that have emerged in recent years to challenge the dominant technocratic, empiricist
approach in public policy studies. The discussion offers a new perspective on an old
but still troubling problem, namely, that the fields of political and policy studies have
generally been guided by an overly empirical orientation that is largely insensitive to
politics. The dominant neopositivist/empiricist approach has given rise to a methodo-
logical orientation—some say 'methodological fetish'—that brings ever more rigor-
ous quantitative analysis to bear on topics of narrower and narrower import. In the
process, the contemporary social sciences have neglected the basic value issues and
social meanings inherent to their subject matter, and, largely as a consequence,
turned more and more away from the big social and political questions that gave rise
to them in the first place. As value issues and social meanings are among the essen-
tial driving forces of politics and policymaking, it is difficult to understand these
processes detached from their normative realities. The consequences of this neglect
have, moreover, long undercut or hobbled efforts to promote more democratic and
socially just forms of policy analysis and policymaking.
The critique of empiricist policy inquiry (empiricism understood here not as the
empirical per se but as an orientation to the empirical) is scarcely new. It extends
back to the outset of the disciplinary effort. But the political theorists and others who
have criticized neopositivism and its empiricist methods have mainly been relegated
to the margins of the discipline or written off as troublesome characters, itself a story
in discourse politics. Empirical research practices, despite their widely recognized
limitations, have thus proven quite resistant to change. In recent years, however, the
challenge has again been renewed through developments in critical, postempiricist,
and postmodern theories in the humanities and social sciences. These perspectives
have brought with them a more sophisticated emphasis on social meaning and
values, this time through a deeper understanding of language and discourse. It is to
an explication of these approaches that this work is devoted. The chapters that
follow apply these perspectives to the study of public policy and policy analysis.
It is not that mainstream political and policy studies have neglected ideas and dis-
course altogether. Indeed, thanks to the 'new institutionalism' in particular, the role
of ideas has experienced a comeback in the social sciences. But the standard
approach is to treat ideas as resources that actors possess; that is, as properties.
While some actors do possess more information than others—experts to be sure—
this view taken alone neglects other, more fundamental aspects of policy discourse.
Not only does it fail to capture how ideas and discourses can have a force of their
own independently of particular actors, but also it misses the ways in which the
actors themselves are properties of the discourses. Discourse, in this view, does more
viii Preface
than reflect a social or political 'reality'; it actually constitutes much of the reality
that has to be explained. In this respect, empiricists fail to appreciate the productive
effects of communicative power. Instead of understanding power only in negative
terms—such as the ability to control or manipulate others—the approach advanced
here also emphasizes that discursive power can determine the very fields of actions,
including the tracks along which political action travels. Discourse, for this reason,
has to be recognized as a powerful meta-category of politics.
The emphasis on discourse and the politics of meaning put forward here does not
naively take the world to move just because of words. But, unlike the empiricist
tradition, words and language, especially when combined with power, are recognized
themselves be a form of action, and thus important data for political and policy
analysis. Whereas empiricism treats language and meaning as an ornament of social
behaviour, a discursive approach makes clear that discourse and social meaning are
internal to the very social systems we seek to research. Without them, the institu-
tional practices of a society cannot be understood; indeed, they would not even
function, if they could exist at all.
Given that empiricism in the social sciences has failed to produce the promised
body of causal theory, it has persisted at considerable cost. Through its rejection or
marginalization of interpretive inquiry, it has extricated much of the very lifeblood
that drives politics and policymaking and has, in the process, distorted our under-
standing of the nature of the phenomena under investigation. But the solution is not
to reject empirical research. A discourse approach, rather, seeks to show that we need
a much more refined understanding of the interactions that construct reality, in par-
ticular the way the empirical is embedded in the normative. Indeed, we come to see
that all research is located across a subjective continuum. This necessarily negates
the possibility of the kind of rigorous causal theory sought by empiricists, but it
opens the way to a much more textured, sophisticated understanding of social and
political reality. Moreover, the constructionist view is not just a new idea about how
to reconstruct our research methodologies; it provides in fact a better picture—even
empirical description—of what social scientists already do. By stripping away the
outdated pretences of empiricism, it makes it easier to deal with social scientific
practices in a way that is both more cogent and more relevant.
In the pages that follow the reader should not expect to find a comprehensive
theory. The discursive approach, with its resistance to unidirectional causal explana-
tions, provides little in the way of methodological tidiness. Given that outcomes
are seen to depend on contextual factors, universally applicable generalizations are
not to be found. The contingent nature of contextual explanations means that
discourses sometimes directly shape practices in ways that are relatively easy to
identify, but sometimes also do so in a more subtle manner that is difficult to
reconstruct. There is thus no possibility of a causal theory validly applicable across
social contexts.
The book is organized in four parts. Part I introduces the re-emergence of
interest in ideas and discourse (Chapter 2) and then turns to the postempiricist or
constructionist view of social reality (Chapter 3). Public policy is presented here as
Preface ix
a discursive construct that turns on multiple interpretations. Part II examines more
specifically the nature of discursive politics and discourse theory (Chapter 4) and
illustrates through a particular disciplinary debate the theoretical, methodological,
and political implications of such a conceptual reframing of policy inquiry (Chapter 5).
Taking up the epistemological and methodological issues raised by the discursive
approach, Part III offers a postempiricist methodology for policy inquiry based on
the logic of practical discourse (Chapter 6). The remaining three chapters of the part
then explore specific methodological perspectives pertinent to such an orientation, in
particular the role of interpretation in policy analysis (Chapter 7), narrative policy
analysis (Chapter 8), and the dialectics of policy argumentation (Chapter 9). Part IV
(Chapters 10 and 11) discusses the participatory implications of such a method and
the role of the policy analyst as facilitator of citizen deliberation.
What is the policy analyst in the government agency supposed to do with a dis-
cursive approach, some will ask? The answer is evident throughout the chapters: to
improve policy argumentation. This is already an acknowledged and accepted task
of the analyst. Unfortunately, conventional policy analysis has too often only
narrowly understood its mission as informing public managers and politicians rather
than the broader range of participants. Moreover, the practice has limited its activ-
ities to generating empirical data presented as if they spoke for themselves. As we
see here, the task of improving argumentation requires more that just supplying
'better' data. It must as well include a more sophisticated understanding of the rela-
tionship of social science to political deliberation, including how various types of
knowledge fit differently into different kinds of policy arguments and how the dis-
cursive structure of an argument itself has an impact on the deliberative process. As
discourses both frame and carry knowledge, they both supply the analyst's data with
meaning and structure the way policy is discussed and decided. Although this is not
designed as a 'how to do it' book—an approach to which an interpretive discourse
analysis does not readily lend itself—much of the material for the more practical
policy analyst is found in Parts III and IV
Some will argue that a discursive approach with its emphasis on narratives and
storylines can only land us in the swamp of political relativism. This criticism,
countered in Chapters 6 and 7, hinges on an outdated neopositivist understanding of
relativism. Before we get there, however, the reader should be clear that the discurs-
ive paradigm does not overlook or neglect the relation of ideas to power and inter-
ests. Indeed, a discourse approach of the type advanced here is grounded in a
recognition that the distorting influences of power, ideology, manipulatory rhetoric,
or authoritarian forces are basic features of political life. At the same time, the
approach recognizes that decisions and actions are taken and that this always occurs
in the context of ongoing stories about social and political phenomena, including the
stories of the less powerful. Indeed, the decision-making process is generally driven
by narrative accounts of problems and their causes. If communicative practices were
only the manifestations of power and ideology, making decisions would mainly be a
matter of determining whose domination we should accept. But some stories are
more truthful, persuasive, and humane than other, as demonstrated by both common