The focus of this paper is on policy discourse as a legitimacy and consensus building resource. Its conceptual framework is discursive institutionalism as developed by Vivien Schmidt (2002). The paper claims that although discursive institutionalism shows why, where and how policy discourse matters it does not clarify what determines its effectiveness. The paper argues that trustworthiness and the credibility of the source of policy discourse plays a key role in the effectiveness of discourse. It integrates the neo-positivist narrative analysis framework (Jones and Mcbeth 2010) to the discursive institutionalist one and studies policy discourse as policy narratives, i.e. as causal stories with a beginning, middle and end, which aim at attributing cause, blame and responsibility over a policy problem (Stone 2002; Roe 1994). This is compatible to (and indeed fully appropriate with) the emphasis of discursive institutionalism on clearly observable implications of the theory – implications that can be tested. In this context the paper tests the hypothesis that a policy narrative will produce an effective policy discourse if the key policy actors, the public or both trust the narrator. The contribution of the paper is both conceptual and empirical. Conceptually it elucidates what determines the effectiveness of policy discourse. Empirically, the paper contributes evidence to an over-theorized and relatively new conceptual framework. It looks at the case of the Greek pension reform during 1990-2002. Both Greece and pension reform are under-investigated within discursive institutionalism. The evidence of the paper confirms the hypothesized relationship between trust and the effectiveness of policy discourse.
