Table Of ContentDiscursive Governance in Politics,
Policy, and the Public Sphere
Discursive Governance in Politics,
Policy, and the Public Sphere
Edited by Umut Korkut, Kesi Mahendran, Gregg
Bucken-Knapp, and Robert Henry Cox
discursive governance in politics, policy, and the public sphere
Copyright © Umut Korkut, Kesi Mahendran, Gregg Bucken-Knapp, and Robert
Henry Cox, 2015.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-49577-8
All rights reserved.
First published in 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United
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NY 10010.
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this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and
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United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-55885-8 ISBN 978-1-137-49578-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137495785
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Discursive governance in politics, policy, and the public sphere / edited by
Umut Korkut, Kesi Mahendran, Gregg Bucken-Knapp, Robert Henry Cox.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Communication in politics—European Union countries—Case studies.
2. Communication—Political aspects—European Union countries—Case
studies. 3. Political planning—European Union countries—Case studies.
4. Public opinion—European Union countries—Case studies. I. Korkut,
Umut. II. Mahendran, Kesi. III. Bucken-Knapp, Gregg. IV. Cox,
Robert Henry.
JA85.2.E85D57 2015
320.9401'4—dc23
2015010186
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Amnet.
First edition: September 2015
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Ailsa McKay (1963–2014)
Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Preface xi
Robert Henry Cox
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction Discursive Governance: Operationalization
and Applications 1
Umut Korkut, Kesi Mahendran, Gregg Bucken-Knapp,
and Robert Henry Cox
Part I Political Parties. How Do the Political Parties
Use/Generate Discourses and Representations?
1 Racialized Violence against Migrants in Greece 15
Lena Karamanidou
2 Investing in Our Future? The Influence of Social Investment
Ideas on Family Policy Discourses in Finland, Germany,
and the UK 31
Mikael Nygård, Mikko Kuisma, Nicole Krüger,
and Verity Campbell-Barr
3 Successful Transplants, Reform Governments, and Health
Care Policy Reform in Slovakia and Hungary 47
Umut Korkut and Aron Buzogány
4 It’s Got to Be a She! The Media Portrayal of Selecting
the First Female Social Democratic Party Leaders
in Sweden and Finland 63
Mari K. Niemi
viii ● Contents
Part II Implementing Policy: Discursive Interpretation of Policy
by Political and Social Actors
5 Doing More with Less? Financial Engineering Instruments
for Urban Development in EU Cohesion Policy 77
Marcin Dąbrowski
6 Externalization of the EU Asylum Policy under the Light of the
Arab Spring: How Did South-European Countries Recalibrate
after the Uprisings? 95
Alexandra Bousiou and Antonios Kontis
7 Implementing Gender Budgeting in Scotland and Spain:
A Comparative Feminist Analysis 109
Angela O’Hagan
8 The Eye of the Beholder: Narrating Crisis in the Ongoing
Swedish Labor Migration Policy Debate 127
Gregg Bucken-Knapp, Andrea Spehar, and Jonas Hinnfors
Part III Public Sphere: The Resonance and Resistance of Discourses
and Representations
9 Public Narratives of European Citizenship—the Dialogical
Citizen in the European Public Sphere 147
Kesi Mahendran, Ima Jackson, and Anubhuti Kapoor
10 European Integration and Mainstreaming of Stateless
Nationalist and Regionalist Parties: The Scottish National Party
and Frisian National Party 163
Arno van der Zwet
11 Equal but Separate? LGBTI Rights in Contemporary
South Africa 179
Hande Eslen-Ziya, Aidan McGarry, Cheryl Potgieter,
and Finn CG Reygan
Bibliography 191
List of Contributors 225
Index 229
List of Illustrations
Table 1.1 Greek National Elections and Governments 18
Table 2.1 Coding Book for the Content Analysis 35
Table 2.2 The Prevalence of Social Investment Ideas in Finnish,
German, and British Government Programs
during the 2000s 37
Table 3.1 Cases/Transformation of Health Care Systems 50
Table 3.2 Discourses/Instructions/Outcomes 52
Table 4.1 Key News Frames of the SAP and SDP Leadership
Elections as Expressed in the Selected Newspaper
Headlines 67
Figure 5.1 JESSICA Implementation System 80
Table 7.1 Critical Actors 115
Table 7.2 Principal Frames 116
Figure 9.1 Ten Position Migration-Mobility Continuum 155
Table 9.1 Active Disidentification with European Citizenship 158
Table 9.2 Active Identification with European Citizenship 160
Preface
Robert Henry Cox
One of the most profound disputes in the social sciences sets those who
believe human societies follow the laws of nature against those who believe
human societies are constructed by people who imagine the world they live
in. This dispute is reflected in a number of dualities, such as whether struc-
ture or agency is the determinant of human behavior, and whether material
conditions or ideas shape our values and preferences. At issue is the question
of whether people shape the world they live in, or are forced to accommodate
themselves to forces beyond their control.
While intellectual trends throughout the years have swung the pendu-
lum back and forth in these disputes, most sensible approaches tack a course
down the middle. Scholars who do so strive to recognize that there are immu-
table elements of the material world, but also acknowledge that humans have
a unique capability to shape and manipulate the physical world. At the same
time, they recognize that human forms of thought and communication allow
us to imagine worlds different from the one we inhabit, and to recognize that
our abilities to influence the world allow us to direct our efforts to pushing
outcomes in a desired direction. The social sciences were forged in this vast
middle ground on which scholars stake competing claims over where the bal-
ance among these dualities is to be found.
Yet this is more than a merely academic debate. Differences in the way
people understand the world form the basis of ideologies, inform collective
action, and shape the way government officials devise policies to address what
they perceive to be the salient public issues of their time. How these issues are
worked out in the political world provides the empirical data scholars use to
bolster their intellectual claims.
Politics and policy are creative enterprises, where actors devote huge
amounts of energy to having their imaginations accepted. Sometimes these
imaginations are normative visions of the way the world should work. Some-
times they are specific prescriptions for the problems officials believe need
xii ● Preface
to be addressed. Often what results are delicate compromises forged from
the multitude of perspectives brought to bear on any decision. As social sci-
entists, we understand much about how such politics and policy decisions
work. Our forensic skills are good.
Yet there is a coordination problem in the social sciences. For years, the
twin notions of expertise and specialization caused social scientists to focus
on more discrete problems and talk less with each other. We created unique
schools of thought that have hardened over time into distinctive disciplines.
We are economists, sociologists, historians, anthropologists, political scien-
tists. While we perfect the specialized knowledge that is the bread and butter
of our distinctive disciplines, our intense focus has caused us to lose sight of
the larger issues that confront human societies. Moreover, we overlook the
areas where our understandings and interpretations link together and overlap.
Thus, our biggest contemporary challenge is to transcend disciplinary
parochialism and use fresh perspectives to tackle the big problems that we
face. The problem of disciplinary specialization is vexing, but is being dis-
cussed with increasing frequency. In the United States, the premier orga-
nization for funding scholarly research, the National Science Foundation,
has created new programs to foster interdisciplinary collaboration among
scholars. The main inspiration for this project is a belief that the most cre-
ative solutions to intellectual and practical problems lie not within the “silos”
of disciplinary specialization, but at the interfaces among disciplines where
scholars are liberated from the strictures of their own disciplinary rules and
can sample the insights from other fields.
In addition to the intellectual need for interdisciplinary knowledge, we
can see in public debates a growing concern with the tendency of social scien-
tists to eschew the study of real problems in society. Our professional norms
teach us that we are merely observing the patterns in the world. When we
attempt to influence developments, we cease to be objective scientists and
become policy advocates. Advocacy is a bad word in the academy, unless
such advocacy is devoted to bragging about one’s own specialized field of
knowledge.
In many Western countries, the general public has become dissatisfied
with this detached approach to scholarship. To again take the National Sci-
ence Foundation as an example, several members of the United States Con-
gress have taken issue with decisions by the NSF to fund research that they
deem trivial. These members of Congress have successfully passed legislation
requiring the NSF to warrant that the studies it funds contribute to national
security or promote economic competitiveness. In a similar vein, The Carn-
egie Foundation, a philanthropic organization in the United States, has pro-
vided several million dollars to a number of American universities to devise
