Authoritative Governance: Policy Making in the Age of Mediatization

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1 University Press Scholarship Online You are looking at 1-10 of 165 items for: keywords : policy analysis Authoritative Governance: Policy Making in the Age of Mediatization Maarten A. Hajer Published in print: 2009 Published Online: February 2010 ISBN: eisbn: Item type: book DOI: / acprof:oso/ Mediatic representation has become an integral part of politics and policy. The dominance of incident-oriented media formats has led students of politics and media to fear a trend of dumbing down : the privileging of style over content. This book takes issue with the dumbing down thesis both on theoretical and empirical grounds. In particular it investigates how an authoritative governance is possible in crisisridden circumstances in a mediatized environment. Maarten Hajer comes up with a communicative understanding of authority, creating a new basis for an authoritative governance in a world marked by political and institutional fragmentation. Extending his discourse-analytical framework, Hajer uses both discursive and dramaturgical methods to study policy makers in their struggle for authority. Three elaborate case studies provide a wealth of details of the dynamics of authority in today's mediatized polity and the peculiar role of crisis and incidents in this. The message of the book is that in the age of mediatization governance needs to be performed. Hajer illuminates contours of a new authoritative governance that encompass different elements than usually get represented in the media or indeed in textbooks on media studies, public policy, or governance. The book shows new ways to recombine traditional government of standing institutions to notions of network governance. The book thus provides new ideas about authoritative governance which is based on the need to actively create relations with a variety of publics. Reframing Public Policy: Discursive Politics and Deliberative Practices DOI: / X Page 1 of 7

2 Item type: book In recent years a set of new postempiricist approaches to public policy, drawing on discursive analysis and participatory deliberative practices, have come to challenge the dominant technocratic, empiricist models in policy analysis. In this book, brings together this work for the first time and critically examines its implications for the field of public policy studies. He describes the theoretical, methodological and political dimensions of this emerging approach to policy research. The book includes a discussion of the social construction of policy problems, the role of interpretation and narrative analysis in policy inquiry, the dialectics of policy argumentation, and the uses of participatory policy analysis. After an introductory chapter, ten further chapters are arranged in four parts: Part I, Public Policy and the Discursive Construction of Reality (two chapters), introduces the re-emergence of interest in ideas and discourse. It then turns to the postempiricist or constructionist view of social reality, presenting public policy as a discursive construct that turns on multiple interpretations. Part II, Public Policy as Discursive Politics (two chapters), examines more specifically the nature of discursive politics and discourse theory and illustrates through a particular disciplinary debate the theoretical, methodological, and political implications of such a conceptual reframing of policy inquiry. Part III, Discursive Policy Inquiry: Resituating Empirical Analysis (four chapters), offers a postempiricist methodology for policy inquiry based on the logic of practical discourse, and explores specific methodological perspectives pertinent to such an orientation, in particular the role of interpretation in policy analysis, narrative policy analysis, and the dialectics of policy argumentation. Part IV, Deliberative Governance (two chapters), discusses the participatory implications of such a method and the role of the policy analyst as facilitator of citizen deliberation. Making Social Science Relevant: Policy Inquiry in Critical Perspective DOI: / X This introductory chapter makes the point that public policy studies has been one of the fastest growing specializations in the social sciences, and has largely been an American phenomenon. It looks at what the field includes, and at the previously dominant practice of technocratic policy Page 2 of 7

3 analysis. The problems that have emerged with the technocratic practice of policy-analytic research are then examined by looking at the policy orientation in its broader political context. The emphasis here is on the American story, which best illustrates the limitations of the practice as it has emerged. The last section of the chapter looks at the postempiricist alternative. Policy argumentation and discourse (participatory policy analysis). Policy Analysis as Discursive Practice: The Argumentative Turn DOI: / X This is the last of four chapters offering a postempiricist methodology for policy inquiry based on the logic of practical discourse, and explores the dialectics (logical structure) of policy argumentation. Approaches are examined to discursive policy analysis and policy argumentation with an emphasis on the integration of empirical and normative inquiry. The discussion is oriented around a particular line of development in the argumentative turn, namely, a dialectical communications approach based on the informal or good-reasons logic of argumentation. In particular, the productive capacities of the communications model are emphasized, namely, its ability to generate ways of thinking and seeing that open new possibilities for problem-solving and action, or, in the language of Habermas s critical theory, its communicative power. The different sections of the chapter look at argumentative discursive policy practices, the communications model of argumentative policy analysis, the search for rational procedures in argumentation, the logic of policy arguments (practical discourse), policy argumentation as practical reason, policy argumentation as communicative interaction (the role of analytical discourses), and critical rationality as undistorted communication. Public Policy as Narrative: Stories, Frames, and Metanarratives DOI: / X Page 3 of 7

4 This is the third of four chapters offering a postempiricist methodology for policy inquiry based on the logic of practical discourse, and explores the narrative form of discourse and narrative analysis, an emerging and promising orientation in policy analysis. The social meanings uncovered by the interpretive analysis described in Chapter 7 are typically embedded in a policy narrative, designed to portray the fuller picture of a policy problem and the potential solutions. Built around interpretations, the narrative represents the policy situation, and offers a view of what has to be done and what the expected consequences will be. While there is a fair amount of conceptual overlap between the concepts of discourse and narration, narrative analysis is used in this discussion to refer to the analysis of stories. The first two sections of the chapter examines the general features of a narrative story, emphasizing its uses in both the social sciences and everyday social contexts, and discusses the basic epistemological issues involved in the production of a narrative text. The second three sections survey two prominent approaches to narrative discourse analyses that have emerged in the field of policy analysis per se: those of Stone and Roe. The last section examines how the logic of good reasons underlies the rationality of the narrative. Public Policy and Administration: Comparative Policy Analysis Richard I. Hofferbert and David Louis Cingranelli in A New Handbook of Political Science Published in print: 1998 Published Online: ISBN: eisbn: DOI: / How can we explain policy similarities and differences across time, jurisdiction, and country? Examples are offered in a comparison of social and economic context, the role of institutions, ideology, democratic type, industrialization, and social change as they account for two political outcomes: welfare policy and party election programs. Key methodological and theoretical issues are raised, relating to the empirical demands of causality and contingency. How politics matters is ultimately left unanswered because of methodological indeterminacies, though three findings remain: policies are not made in a socio economic vacuum, institutional effects are still an open question, and policy conditions are attributable to partisan conditions. Page 4 of 7

5 Interpreting Public Policy: Normative Frames and Methodological Issues DOI: / X This is the second of four chapters offering a postempiricist methodology for policy inquiry based on the logic of practical discourse, and explores the role of interpretation in policy analysis. While empiricists have sought to restrict the focus on meaning to the observable dimensions of social reality, the interpretive orientation requires the social scientist also to pursue the unobservable. Because language is able to carry and transmit meanings among people, access to the realm of meaning often can be gained through the study of communication (both spoken and written), but such meanings are generally only indirectly made available through such communications, so it is necessary for the analyst to move beyond empirical methods (such as content analysis) to an interpretive reconstruction of the situational logic of social action. This involves inferring other people s meanings by identifying patterns that emerge through an examination of the verbal and non-verbal messages they give about their beliefs and experiences. Narratives, for example, are a way of making the subjective dimensions of verbal actions more accessible, and the social world is in significant part organized and interpreted through narrative exchanges in their various forms. The different sections of this chapter look at interpretative policy analysis, interpretative frames, methodological strategies, policy analysis as thick description (an approach for exploring and discovering the meanings embedded in the language and actions of policy actors), the objectivity of interpretation, validity as credibility, and social meaning and the question of causality. Conclusion: Internationalisation through Policy Mark Thatcher in Internationalisation and Economic Institutions:: Comparing the European Experience Published in print: 2007 Published Online: September 2007 ISBN: eisbn: DOI: / acprof:oso/ Page 5 of 7

6 This final chapter summarises the findings of the book and relates them to broader debates about internationalisation of markets and domestic institutional reform. It presents a policy analysis approach of market internationalisation and economic institutions that builds on, but develops, second image reversed and comparative institutionalist approaches. The framework put forward differs from these last two by adopting a broader definition of internationalisation, one that includes international policy decisions. It suggests that carriers of internationalisation are not just socio-economic interests but also political and state actors, especially governments. It argues that internationalisation affects national decisions through a broader range of mechanisms than economic efficiency or distributional conflicts, and highlights those mechanisms that feed in directly to the domestic policy process and involve governments. It suggests that nations that represent very different varieties of capitalism can adopt similar sectoral institutions, but that they do so through diverse routes that reflect their domestic politics. Introduction: A Policy Analysis of Market Internationalisation and National Economic Institutions Mark Thatcher in Internationalisation and Economic Institutions:: Comparing the European Experience Published in print: 2007 Published Online: September 2007 ISBN: eisbn: DOI: / acprof:oso/ This introductory chapter offers an overview of the book. It sets out the book's subject, namely the effects of different forms of market internationalisation on decisions about national institutions. It also seeks to integrate internationalisation of markets and policy making through its policy analysis framework. That framework seeks to avoid an over-narrow focus on international capital/trade flows and concentration on socio-economic interests driven by economic efficiency that weaken existing analyses of internationalisation. Instead, it gives due weight to policy making at both the international and domestic levels, underlines the role of governments and public officials in forming and leading reform coalitions, and shows how policy forms of internationalisation were influential because of their role in the policy process. The introduction ends by setting out the book's research design (five sectors chosen due to variations in forms of internationalisation compared across four countries that represent different varieties of capitalism ) and summarises the following chapters. Page 6 of 7

7 The Deliberative Policy Analyst: Theoretical Issues and Practical Challenges DOI: / X The preceding chapters have covered the theoretical and epistemological support for citizen participation in policy-making. In this final chapter, the implications of this for the conduct of policy analysis are addressed, in particular the role of policy analysts as facilitators of deliberative practices. The different sections of the chapter are: Communicative Policy Analysis in Critical Planning Theory the conduct of policy analysis, in particular the role of the policy analyst as facilitator of deliberative practices; Communicative Theory: Replying to the Critics of the communications model; Policy Epistemics for discursive policy analysis; and The Curriculum: Participatory Training and Qualitative Inquiry the implications of a discursive, participatory approach for the policy analysis curriculum. Page 7 of 7