Revisiting Language Based Approaches to Policy Analysis

Abstract

Post-positivist policy analysis has fairly highlighted that policy-making is not simply shaped by material interests and calculations but is a struggle within the meaning itself. Range of research agendas have been established in order to understand the intellectual and ideational dimensions of policy processes: metaphors such as “policy paradigms”, “policy narratives”, “cognitive and normative frames”, “logic of appropriateness”, “référentiels”, etc. have shaped meaning as a link between language, actors and power. Other reflections integrating linguistic, psychological, and anthropologic or “pragmatist” approaches have emphasized the heuristic value of concepts as “discourse”, “argumentation”, "narrative" or “rhetorics” for policy analysis. This constellation within post-positivist policy analysis has overcome some blind spots and short comings of rational choice and other positivistic approaches. However, these approaches have remained curiously vague about how they proceed in their “interpretive” agenda properly speaking. Outside policy analysis, questions about how meaning is constructed have been widely discussed by linguistics, semantics, and other “language sciences”. In the 1990’s, Emery Roe and other policy analysts made the point that notions such as “intertextuality” or “meta-narratives“ could enlighten how policy actors make sense of the world. In spite of its great promise, this research agenda has been rather left behind. Therefore, the panel wants to explore to what extent contemporary literary theory, linguistics, and more generally “language-based” approaches can provide methodological tools for policy analysis. We invite scholars from a variety of disciplines (especially policy analysis and international relations,) willing to discuss the bringing-in of “language-based” approaches for policy analysis to submit their paper. Papers can discuss the aforementioned concepts of “discourse”, “narrative”, “argumentation”, etc. or they can present empirical applications of these concepts within specific policy field. We also welcome papers that bridge the gap between the language sciences (broadly defined) and policy analysis.

Title	Details
It’s “The Other” Stupid: The explanatory Value of French Discourse Linguistics for Political Science	View Paper Details
The Presence of History in Public Policy as an Intertext: the Case of Franco-German Reconciliation	View Paper Details
The Tell-Tale Heart of Political Science: Literal vs. Metaphorical Use of Narrative in Analysing Power Relations	View Paper Details
Policy Narratives and Narrative Strategies in Policy Analysis: The Case of Greek Pension Reform (1990-2002)	View Paper Details
Discourse Analysis Advanced?	View Paper Details