Festschrift für Fritz W. Scharpf - MPIfG

V. Schmidt · The Boundaries of “Bounded Generalizations” 339
its adversarial stance against the government’s welfare and employment
measures – replacing the opposition – and forcing the government to take
account of its concerns. The problem here, however, is that the very authoritativeness
of the government discourse, together with the adversarial nature
of the response, makes modifying the policy program difficult. This is why
incorporating societal concerns more fully at the coordinative stage of the
discourse, as is generally the pattern in multi-actor systems, is often a better
remedy. But here, other problems result.
2.2.2 Discursive Interactions in National Multi-Actor Systems
In multi-actor systems characterized by joint decision-making, where a
much wider range of policy actors is responsible for negotiating policies, the
coordinative discourse is more elaborate, given the need for policy actors to
reach agreement among themselves if there is to be any policy at all in a
situation where governments have little capacity to impose reform. The
communicative discourse by comparison tends to be comparatively thin,
since the government tends to do little more than inform the general public
of decisions legitimated already in the coordinative realm, as key policy
actors inform their constituencies of the outcome of the deliberations and
legitimate their positions in terms of those constituencies’ own particular
cognitive and normative criteria (see Figure 3). Here, there is often greater
overlap between members of discursive policy communities and the key
actors in the coordinative discourse, while the policy entrepreneur may be
connected to any one of the numbers of policy actors involved in policy
construction, whether state or societal (see Schmidt 2002b). The large numbers
of policy actors involved in the process, together with the absence of
any one player able to exercise hierarchical direction or engage in unilateral
action, ensures that the coordinative discourse tends to involve deliberation
among equals, rather than simply the imparting of information.
As a result, the discursive interactions tend to be contractual in tone, as
the key policy actors seek to accommodate one another in order to build a
common point of view and a mutually agreed-upon policy program. The
discursive process here is most akin to what occurs in contract negotiations
(which tend to be non-hierarchical and bi- or multi-lateral), because legitimacy
depends upon policy elites convincing their separate constituencies
that the agreement is better than what would have happened if the negotiations
had failed and there were no contract. No single, strong authoritative
voice is likely to emerge out of this context. Instead, there are the many