Festschrift für Fritz W. Scharpf - MPIfG

V. Schmidt · The Boundaries of “Bounded Generalizations” 327
actors to switch their games, for example, from non-cooperative games to
cooperative games, to extricate themselves from prisoners’ dilemmas, and
so on. 3
As such, discursive institutionalism elucidates the realm of institutional
interaction which rational choice institutionalism defines away when it assumes
fixed preferences, perfect knowledge, stable institutions, and interestbased
strategies. Discursive institutionalism, in other words, can serve to
explain those causal influences on policy change – such as changing preferences
in situations of imperfect knowledge with changeable institutions and/
or non-instrumental purposes and strategies – that make rational choice explanations
fail as often as not. As a result, although discursive institutionalism
cannot (and does not aspire to) generate universal generalizations focused
on the rationalist logic of actors’ policy choices, nor even to Scharpf’s
“incomplete theories” and “bounded” rationalist generalizations, it can elucidate
the discursive logic of policy choice. It does this by identifying the
discursive factors that contribute to the success or failure of policy reform
and by generating partial theories that can be tested against the evidence, to
determine when discourse has causal influence on policy change because it
affects actors’ institutionally-constituted preferences, perceptions, and purposes
rather than simply reflects them. One way of testing is through the use
of matched pairs of cases where just about everything remains constant except
the discourse (see Schmidt 2001a, 2002a).
For example, ideas and discourse are essential to explaining how the
Netherlands in the early 1980s was able to solve its major economic crisis
and why Belgium was not, despite similar economic problems, policy legacies,
actor perceptions and preferences, and institutional setting. In the
Netherlands, the discourse of a new Prime Minister, who credibly threatened
government intervention because “it is there to govern” as he evoked
new terms for the debate, spurred the social partners to begin a more cooperative
set of deliberations with new union ideas about the trade-off in
wages and profits (Visser/Hemerijck 1997; Schmidt 2000b: 285–286). In
Belgium, by contrast, no amount of discourse by government or even the
King, who pleaded to “put our differences aside” as if “we were at war …
for the preservation of our economy” managed to persuade the unions to
3 Note that game theorists themselves have generally found in experimental games that actors
who do not communicate with one another largely reproduce the predicted results of
non-cooperative games, whereas those who communicate even very briefly tend to move
from non-cooperative games toward cooperative ones (see Colman 1982: 119–123).