Festschrift für Fritz W. Scharpf - MPIfG

328 V · Erklärung und Verallgemeinerung
change their ideas or their adversarial stance (Hemerijck/Visser/Unger
2000; Schmidt 2000b: 289).
For the UK, moreover, although rational choice institutionalism suffices
for the explanation of how Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was able to
impose radical reforms with no more than 40% of the electorate, the staying
power of Prime Minister Thatcher’s reforms can only be fully explained by
reference to the discourse with which she managed increasingly over time to
change public perceptions and preferences. This was in stark contrast with
the equally radical reforms in New Zealand, where neither the Labor Party
nor their National Party successors engaged in any legitimating discourse,
either in the election campaign or after, as they imposed reform. Here, the
influence of discourse is evident by what happened in its absence, to wit, the
radical rejection via referendum of the very institutions that enabled the
government to impose reform without public discussion or consent – even
if, ironically, the reforms remained because the new institutional arrangement
made it much harder to reverse the reforms (see Rhodes 2000;
Schwartz 2000; Schmidt 2000b: 238–250, 2002a).
The causal influence of discourse can also be seen in the differential experience
of individual countries over time, when all else remains constant.
For example, French Prime Minister Juppé’s failed welfare initiatives, imposed
virtually without discourse in 1995 and met with massive strikes, can
be contrasted with Prime Minister Jospin’s successful reforms beginning in
1997, which were accompanied by a fully legitimating discourse. Similarly,
Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi’s failed attempts to impose pension reform
without significant discourse in 1994 can be contrasted with Prime Minister
Dini’s successful discursive negotiation of reforms in 1995 (see Levy 2000;
Ferrera/Gualmini 2000; Schmidt 2000b: 293–301, 2002a).
Finally, discourse is also useful in the explanation of EU level institutional
interactions. For example, it serves to explain how “positive integration”
has occurred in the EU in certain policy sectors against all odds – at
least as predicted by Scharpf’s game-theoretic analysis of strategic institutional
interactions in the EU (Scharpf 1996, 1999). This has, in fact, already
been partially explained in rationalist terms, by showing in the case of the
public utilities and infrastructural sectors how a powerful coalition of
French policy actors and members of the European Parliament (EP), against
a background of favorable court decisions and enhanced EP institutional
power, was able to introduce general interest provisions and considerations
over the Commission’s initially strong opposition (Héritier 2001, 2002). But
although this political resources approach takes us very far indeed in under-