Policy change and discourse in Europe: Can the EU make a ‘square meal out of a stew of paradox’?

Article is part of a special issue on Policy Change and Discourse in Europe.

Article abstract:

'Discursive institutionalism' provides a potentially fruitful means of overcoming the tendential structuralism of much new institutionalist scholarship. In particular, it focuses attention on the interplay of structure and agency and raises important questions about how far we should expect policy - and indeed the polity - to be coherent. Radaelli and Schmidt's drawing together of their discursive institutionalism with the tradition of policy analysis provides a valuable framework for 'bottom-up' analysis of the EU, and particularly of Europeanisation, and provides conceptual guidance for the careful empirical work required to make sense of these phenomena. Historical sociology, with its caution against 'the fallacy of retrospective determinism', provides additional elements for this conceptual framework. In particular, it helps us to interrogate 'general trends' or 'master discourses', rather than taking them for granted as wholly 'external' pressures on particular policy sectors.