Atelier PACTE-LET

Public policy analysis and Discourse: the Missing Link.

The role of discourse in policy research has attracted increasing attention over the last decade or so, coming from two different directions: on the one hand there are the scholars in public policy who have started to get intrigued about what they call the "ideational", "cognitive" or "ideological" aspects of policy, also referred to as "values" or "référentiels" (P. Muller). On the other hand, discourse analysts have become more and more interested in policy issues.  Although both approaches have produced valuable insights into the role of discourse in public policy, there remain gaps in-between these two approaches, which in fact hardly ever really communicate.

In this paper, I will take the case of French Policy Analysis as a paradigmatic example of such a missing link between Discourse and Public Policy analysis. Whereas discourse analysts hardly engage with the notion of public policy, policy analysts tend to have a rather vague and under-problematised notion of "discourse" (or their more or less conceptual equivalents). As a result, discourse as a constitutive dimension of public policy is under-conceptualised. Therefore, as the case of the French policy analysis wil illustrate, it remains difficult to assess the precise role of discursive dimension in the continuity and change of public policies over time, and to explain variations and similarities among policies across contexts.

Post Foucaldian analysis and the New Theory of Discourse could help us to progress towards a discursive public policy analysis. More than any other discourse-analytical strand, it focuses on the conditions of possibility of discourses in time and space and insists on the importance of inter-discursive structure of power, namely through the concept of articulation and rearticulation. Moreover, it is grounded on a pragmatic definition of discourse that allows for a study of discourse as social action. Among "cognitive approach", the french "referentiel" approach may be considered as the most promising premise. The last part of the paper will reconsider the "referentiel" concept in such a perspective.