The politics of economic adjustment in France and Britain: when does discourse matter?

Abstract:

Do legitimating discourses matter for a country's successful adjustment to economic policy change? Or can adjustment more simply be explained by the interplay of economic and political interests, path dependency, or cultural framing? This article argues that discourse - defined as constituting both a set of policy ideas and values and an interactive process of policy construction and communication - matters, and that it can be shown in some instances to exert a causal influence over and above the interplay of interests, institutions, and culture. In illustration, the article examines critical shifts in the political-economic discourses and policy programs of France and Britain, presenting them as matched cases. It finds that while in Britain the presence of an effective legitimating discourse accompanying economic policy change proved transformative, in France the absence of such a discourse until relatively recently proved problematic.