Festschrift für Fritz W. Scharpf - MPIfG

326 V · Erklärung und Verallgemeinerung
jobs in the sheltered sector while altering the postwar male-breadwinner
model (Scharpf 2000a: 104–123). Moreover, Scharpf has explained the capacity
of Britain and New Zealand to impose radical reform of the welfare
state in terms of the particular modes of interaction – a Westminster-type
single actor system in which a minority-dominated, majority party could impose
reform – and actor preferences in a propitious institutional setting – one
in which redistributive social assistance programs are less likely to be defended
by self-interested majorities because of a welfare state funding structure
that divides the “haves” from the “have-nots” (Scharpf 2000a: 96–104).
But there are many things Scharpf’s actor-centered institutionalism does
not help us with. It does not for example explain why the Dutch social partners
changed their orientations and interactions so as to overcome a decade’s
worth of spiraling labor conflict in a deteriorating economy whereas
Belgium did not. It does not explain why in the United Kingdom the bulk of
the reforms of welfare and work were accepted whereas in New Zealand
they led to revolt. Nor can it account for the fact that in certain instances
member-states have been able to overcome the joint-decision traps at the EU
level in order to promote “positive integration.” This is when ideas and discourse
matter in the explanation of policy change.
1.5 Discourse as the Missing Factor in Actor-Centered
Institutionalism
Discourse should be seen as a third set of driving factors in policy change.
This is because it can serve to alter actors’ perceptions of the seriousness of
the policy problem and the challenge to policy legacies; actors’ preferences
in terms of how to respond to the problems and whether to reverse policy
legacies; actors’ cognitive and normative orientations with regard to the effectiveness
and legitimacy of the responses; actors’ purposes with regard to
their interactions, whether to pursue narrow self-interest or other, less instrumental
goals; and actors’ strategies with regard to how to achieve those
purposes while solving the policy problem. As such, discourse can serve to
enhance actors’ problem-solving capacity by altering not only actors’ interest-motivated
behavior through the reconceptualization of interests or the
appeal to values but also their norm-driven behavior, meaning the norms by
which the institutional interactions are themselves structured as much as the
values that inform their choice of norms to follow. In the language of gametheoretic
actor-centered institutionalism, this means that discourse enables