| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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roles played by knowledge and ideas within the policy process. Although they are not generally considered important variables in principal-agent models, policy ideas are the central focus of discourse theory. The following section provides an overview and a critical assessment of discourse perspectives as a theory of regulatory policymaking.
Ideas, Discourse, and Regulation
Political scientists have long recognized the importance of ideas within the policy process. Only recently, however, have ideas been accorded any intrinsic value as a force for policy change. Prior to the mid-1990s, most policy scholars believed that ideas, though at times rhetorically powerful, were a direct outgrowth of strategic political interests.20 Political actors intentionally used “heresthetics,”21 “policy images,”22 or “social constructions”23 to gain support for their preferred policy options. Ideas and issue frames facilitated coalition building by simplifying reality for political actors who possessed inherently limited information processing capabilities. Nevertheless, ideas were little more than symbolic shorthand for otherwise objective social conditions. As social change occurred, ideas necessarily became outmoded and political coalitions became tenuous. Social change thus provided strategic political actors with an opportunity to build new coalitions around new issue frames.
More recently, however, scholars in the post-positivist tradition have argued that ideas are not simply a reflection of interests but a constitutive force in and of themselves. Generally speaking, post-positivists reject the notion that social and political realities can be understood in objective terms; instead, they view the policy process as a highly interpretive and value-laden struggle to define problems through language and discourse.