Recent nuclear energy policies in Germany are characterized by two unusually sharp policy changes. In autumn 2010 the conservative government decided to partially reverse the decision of the previous red-green government to gradually phase out the civil use of nuclear power until 2021 with an extension of the possible operating time for nuclear power station of up to 15 year. Only six month later, after the nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima, did the same conservative government reverse its policy again and immediately closed down 8 nuclear power stations and decided to shut down the last remaining reactor in 2022. This rapid policy change fulfills the conditions of a quasi-experiment in which all economic, institutional, and interest-related factors remain constant, thus the change can only be explained by accounting for the intense public debate after Fukushima.
In our paper we analyze the development of this public debate through a discourse network analysis. Based on a dataset consisting of all statements by all actors on nuclear power policies in two German quality newspapers between November 2010 and June 2011 we analyze the dynamic development of the discourse networks in order to explain the unexpected policy outcome by accounting for:
• actor attributes – nodal (resources, institutional role) & positional (centrality, brokerage, gate-keeping),
• stability and scope of discourse coalitions,
• coherence of argumentative clusters,
• network dynamics (expectations about tie formation, triadic closure, …).
We discuss whether the rapid policy change should be understood as the result of strategic discursive interventions by select political leaders driving the discourse or whether they were themselves forced to change their position by an unfolding discursive dynamic in which the demand to abandon the use of nuclear energy became dominant, and in which discursive agency did not depend solely on institutional power.
