Just after the turn of the century, the issue of a life-course based policy rose quickly on the Dutch policy agenda. This roughly meant that the policy actors agreed on a new social security system that should anticipate on the ways individuals prefer to distribute their time between work and other activities like care, education, leisure, etc. How could this idea become so popular in a few years time? This study suggests that an analysis of rhetorics that finds its basis in post structuralist theory can contribute to an explanation of policy change. For scholars drawing on post structuralist theory, even realist and interpretative policy studies that acknowledge that policymaking is about a struggle between arguments within a political context, fail to understand the interrelationship between arguments, ideas, conceptions of reality and policy change. According to them, rhetorics constitute new believes in the struggle between contingent believes. This implies that the formation of a consensus or a unified constituency involves not the ‘discovery’ of a shared interest or opinion, as is proposed in interpretative studies, but its creation. Drawing on the work of Laclau and Norval some general research questions are formulated. Both Norval and Laclau emphasize that rhetorics should not only be conceived as ‘strategic manipulative acts’, but as constitutive of new discourses. In addition, they relate the deployment of rhetorics to affect. Whereas post-structuralist theory lacks an elaborated set of methodological tools for a systematic analysis of rhetorics, the case study further shows how methods that are developed in Discourse Historical Analysis (see the work of Wodak and others) can be helpful for a post structuralist rhetorical analysis.
