Argumentation and Persuasion in Policymaking: The Interpretive Turn

Traditional policy analysis with its interest in ‘what governments do, why they do it, and what difference it makes’ (Dye 1976) tends to conceptual­ise public policymaking ‘as a coherent process of solving known problems’ (Colebatch 2005, 15).

Since the early 1990s, however, a growing body of literature that emerged with the ‘argumentative turn’ (Fischer and Forester 1993; Fischer and Gottweis 2012a)² or the ‘interpretive turn’ (Healy 1986; Yanow 1995) in policy studies has highlighted the importance of concepts such as discourse, knowledge, and interpretation. In spite of their very heteroge­neous theoretical foundations, the different strands in interpretive policy analysis usually share the social-constructionist assumption ‘that there is nothing in the world whose meaning resides in the object itself’ (Loseke 2003, 18). What is regarded as an incontestable reality in positivist theory is comprehended by post-positivist scholars as being based on interpreta­tions that involve choices and judgments (Bacchi 1999), and that are hence inherently but not obviously normative and political (Herrmann 2009, 24).

This does not imply, however, that they are ‘merely’ constructions and do not really exist. On the contrary, these constructions have far-reaching consequences, as policies, interventions, and controls are built upon them (Groenemeyer 2003, 7).

Post-positivist authors such as Bacchi (1999, 2, 2015) have suggested speaking of ‘problematisations’ rather than ‘problems’ in order to empha­sise that problems acquire their meaning through discursive processes. With discourse being a vague and ambiguous concept to guide empirical observation, many interpretivists have turned to those elements that struc­ture discourse, such as narratives and, consequently, myths. Yet different approaches in interpretive policy analysis differ to a high degree in their understanding of meaning, discourse, and agency—and thus also of the role of myths in constructions of political and social ‘problems’ and ‘solu­tions’. The following section identifies three different approaches that could inspire a first guiding question for researchers when entering a myth analysis: Do we treat myths as social constructions, as conscious creations, or as constitutive for subjects themselves?