Festschrift für Fritz W. Scharpf - MPIfG

340 V · Erklärung und Verallgemeinerung
contractual “sub-discourses” of policy elites informing their own constituencies
of the results of the negotiations while leaving to political actors
(generally the government) the task of communicating the results in vaguer
terms to the general public.
The thinness of the communicative discourse is a function of government
reluctance to do much more than announce the compromises reached in the
context of the coordinative discourse. The government generally offers little
detailed cognitive or normative arguments in favor of the agreed policy for
fear that the compromises reached in private will not withstand public scrutiny
because they violate the ideas and/or values contained in the different
groups’ coordinative sub-discourses. In consequence, the communicative
discourse in multi-actor systems is unlikely to provide the public with significant
orienting or legitimating information beyond what it may have obtained
as members of constituent groups (and thus as an informed public).
The very structure of the discursive process, thus, may seem to violate