Festschrift für Fritz W. Scharpf - MPIfG

334 V · Erklärung und Verallgemeinerung
(who may also overlap with the discursive communities as generators of
ideas). The communicative discourse addressed to the public is likely in a
first instance to involve government declarations to the public. But this is
not necessarily a one-way street, since open discussion and deliberation
generally quickly follows, depending upon the responses of the informed
public and the saliency of the issue to the general public.
The success of the discourse at both coordinative and communicative
stages, moreover, depends on a variety of factors which can only be briefly
mentioned here. These involve – leaving aside such imponderables as
speakers’ persuasive powers based on rhetorical eloquence or psychological
“interactivity” – not only the quality of the ideas in the discourse but also
the quantity of participation. On quality, this means that the discourse does
best if it contains cognitive arguments that demonstrate the policy program’s
relevance, applicability, and coherence; and normative arguments
that resonate with long-standing or newly-emerging values, and complement
rather than contradict the cognitive arguments. On quantity, ideally, this
means the more participants the better – in Habermas’ sense of deliberative
democracy (1989). But in practice, sometimes less is better, because the
extensive public airing of certain issues can lead to less progressive results,
as in immigration policy (Guiraudon 1997). 4
2.2 Discursive Modes of Interaction in Different Institutional
Settings
Institutional settings frame not only actors’ strategic modes of interaction
but also their discursive modes of interaction. As such, they affect not only
the emphasis placed on policy coordination or communication in singleactor
and multi-actor systems but also the tone of the discourse and its tenor.
The differing discursive styles attached to the discursive modes of interaction
in turn lead to different potential discursive problems and solutions.
This is as much the case for purely national single or multi-actor systems as
it is for the supranational multi-actor system represented by the EU. 5
4 For more on the issues of quality and quantity, see: Schmidt (2000a, 2002b: Chapter 5).
5 Note that by speaking of national single or multi-actor systems, I do not mean to imply
that countries are entirely one or the other. For example, even though one can show that
Britain, France, and New Zealand (until 1996) fit the single-actor pattern overall, there are
any number of sectors which are more multi-actor than single-actor. And similarly, coun-