Discursive Institutionalism

Varieties of Approaches

Discursive institutionalism encompasses a wide range of approaches across fields of political science, from constructivism in international relations to the ideational turn in American political development and comparative politics, from the deliberative democracy of political theory to the analysis of campaign rhetoric and media discourse in American electoral politics, and from the discourse analysis of critical legal studies or poststructuralist theory to that of feminist gender studies. In such approaches, when discursive institutionalists focus on ideas, they may consider different types of ideas—cognitive ideas justified in terms of interest-based logics and/or normative ideas legitimated through value-based logics of appropriateness—at different levels of generality, from policy ideas to programmatic ideas or from paradigms to deeper philosophical ideas. When they are more concerned with discourse, they may concentrate on the representation of ideas through frames, narratives, myths, collective memories, stories, scripts, and the like or on the discursive processes by which such ideas are constructed and communicated in the public sphere.

Discursive institutionalists may also be divided over which part of the public sphere they ought to investigate. Some are more interested in the coordinative discourse of the policy sphere, in which policy actors construct ideas through epistemic communities of loosely connected individuals with shared ideas about a common policy enterprise, advocacy coalitions of more closely connected elites with shared ideas and access to policy making in local and national politics, advocacy networks of activists contesting ideas in international politics, and entrepreneurs or mediators who serve as catalysts for change as they articulate the ideas of discursive communities. Other discursive institutionalists are more focused on the communicative discourse of the political sphere, in which political actors discuss, deliberate, and legitimate the ideas developed in the coordinative discourse. These actors [Page 684]include elected officials, opposition parties, or spin doctors, civil servants, and/or policy actors involved in the mass electoral process of public persuasion. But they also involve opinion leaders, public intellectuals, and the media engaged in public debates; organized interests in specialized policy forums; members of civil society engaged in grassroots organizations and social movements; or mini publics participating in citizen juries and issue forums, as well as citizens whose voices are heard not only in opinion polls but also in votes—where actions speak even louder than words. The communicative discourse itself may be seen as top-down, as elites seek to form mass public opinion or legitimize public policy; as bottom-up, as social activists attempt to influence national and international debates; at the top among policy and political actors, as elites debate ideas in national or global policy forums; or at the bottom, among everyday actors engaged in deliberative democracy or in expressing ideas through their everyday practices.

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