Policy change and discourse in Europe: can the EU make a 'square meal out of a stew of paradox'?

West European Politics, March, 2004 by Wincott, Daniel

'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...

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