Festschrift für Fritz W. Scharpf - MPIfG

330 V · Erklärung und Verallgemeinerung
cipal mechanism for policy change is discourse. This occurs through the circulation
of ideas by way of joint European-level agreement on policy purposes
and parallel national deliberations “in the shadow of the Council” (as
a result of an after-the-fact ability to censure or even impose sanctions
where member-states make no progress in their self-set targets). Scharpf
does not suggest how one would analyze this, however, other than asides
about “learning by monitoring,” shaming, and using the EU in arguments in
national policy discussions. The process would in fact involve all of these
and a lot more, and could be better elucidated through the examination of
discursive actor constellations and their modes of discursive interaction in
institutional settings.
2 Discourse in Institutional Interactions
Discourse at its most general level encompasses a set of ideas about public
life and a process of interaction among public actors and with society at
large focused on generating and legitimizing those ideas. As a set of ideas
related to the policy process, discourse offers both cognitive arguments
about the logic and necessity of a particular course of action and normative
arguments about its appropriateness. As an interactive process, discourse
involves both a coordinative discourse among key policy actors focused on
constructing a common policy program and a communicative discourse
between political actors and society at large focused on informing and deliberating
about such a program (see Schmidt 2000a, 2002b: Chapter 5).
Institutions, moreover, frame these discursive modes of interaction much
as they do the strategic modes of interaction of rational choice institutionalism.
Thus, the interactions among discursive actors – constituted by discursive
policy communities and policy entrepreneurs, by policy and political
actors, as well as by informed and general publics – differ depending upon
the institutional settings. Although these discursive institutional interactions
may mirror the full gamut of strategic institutional interactions outlined by
Scharpf, I focus here for reasons of brevity and clarity mainly on those
found in the single and multi-actor systems mentioned above. In single actor
systems characterized by hierarchical direction, the coordinative discourse
tends to be rather thin next to the more elaborate communicative discourse,
whereas in multi-actor systems characterized by joint decision-making, it
tends to be the reverse, with the communicative discourse rather thin and