Beschreibung
Preface The European tradition of network analysis in political science differs some- what from its American counterpart. It was inspired by work in political sociology in the 1970s and 1980s. In the German and Swiss case, the same research design was employed by generations of researchers: identify the relevant organizations for a policy process, administer a network survey on information exchange or collaboration, influence attribution, venue participa- tion and other network relations, and identify the most central organizations as well as subgroups in order to reveal interest group influence on policy making. In many respects, this is valuable because numerous studies with nearly identical survey questions exist and are now amenable to inferential network analysis, a more recent methodological development (e. g., Leifeld and Schneider 2012; Ingold and Leifeld 2016). On the other hand, the inferences one can generate based on such an approach are limited because only a specific aspect of policy making is captured. A parallel development in the United States in the 1990s and 2000s was concerned with the structure of policy subsystems and the role of policy beliefs and ideas for their structure. This implies that actors' policy beliefs and verbal interactions matter for a collective understanding of a complex policy problem, an idea that is akin to the notion of political discourse. Yet, more recently, these approaches were influenced by a more collaboration- and collective-action-centered perspective and lost much of their original focus on policy beliefs. In short, the literature on policy networks and the literature on belief systems and advocacy coalitions have been increasingly merged, and the study of advocacy coalitions is now often perceived as interchangeable with the study of policy networks. This book is an attempt to overcome the methodological limitations of policy network analysis and operationalize the relational elements hidden in political debates. As it turns out, policy debates are complex and dynamic systems that need to be analyzed with scientific scrutiny. The time has come for a more rigorous approach to studying political discourse than the hermeneutic approaches that have been prevalent in the last decades. Only quantitative, relational methods, coupled with a (possibly qualitative) bridge from text to data, will permit a systematic study of policy debates. After receiving my master's degree in Politics and Public Administration at the University of Konstanz in 2007, I had some experience with policy networks and related approaches. Before I started my doctoral studies at the Max Planck Institute, I co-edited a volume on policy networks (Schneider et al. 2009). For one of the chapters, Volker Schneider at the University of Konstanz advised me to look into ways that network analysis could be combined with the notion of discourse. This was a very vague idea that needed to be developed into something that other people could actually use in their own research. For the time being, I contributed ideas to a joint review chapter of existing work with my co-editors (0anning et al. 2009). In the same year, I joined the PhD program of the Max Planck International Research Network on Aging (MaxNetAging) at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research and the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods. I soon developed an interest in the politics of demographic change and old-age provision, a topic that was both compatible with my newly developing interest in aging research and demography, and my background in the study of politics and policy networks. After talking to a variety of experts on demography and politics, I realized that organized interests were playing important roles in the politics of demography and old-age security, and that one of their main strategies was the deliberate use of the media and other venues to frame the pension debate in ways that supported their material interests. At the time, demographers thought senior citizens' interest groups and peak associations were some of the most influential players in the politics of demographic change. At some point, however, I realized that demographic change was only a phenomenon that caused the debate, but the debate was actually about the future design of a sustainable pension system, one of the subsystems most severely affected by demographic change. It turned out that other types of interest groups like financial market actors and employers' associations were apparently playing a more important role than senior citizens' interest groups in the important reforms of the last decades. The problem was that existing methods like the survey-based policy network approach or approaches related to policy beliefs were not sufficient to fully capture the dynamics of the debate. I turned to my previous work on discourse networks and started working on a more comprehensive methodological approach. What I wanted was a methodology that would tell me what competing advocacy coalitions or discourse coalitions looked like at any point in time, how they changed over time, and how some actors left their coalitions and joined the political opponent. Later, I also became interested in the behavioral mechanisms that were driving these changes at the micro-level of a debate. Therefore I started combining my existing knowledge on network analysis, policy networks, political discourse, policy beliefs, and programming in order to come up with such a methodology and apply it to German pension politics in order to explain the policy changes that came about in recent years. The results of these developments, which are also the results of my PhD work, are presented in this book. On the way from the initial idea to the product presented in this book, I received valuable input from a number of people and organizations. Volker Schneider, Professor of Empirical Theory of the State at the University of Konstanz, triggered my original interest in the role of ideas and policy beliefs in policy networks. He also became my doctoral advisor. Christoph Engel and Martin Hellwig, the Directors of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn, realized my potential when they chose to hire me as a PhD student over candidates from economics and other disciplines to which the Max Planck Institute usually provides a home. Christoph Engel became my doctoral co-advisor. I am greatly indebted to him for this exciting and sometimes challenging opportunity to grow up in a truly interdisciplinary environment. Christoph Knill, then professor in Konstanz and now Professor of Political Science at the University of Munich, served on my committee as the third reviewer. Without the support of staff and colleagues in the MaxNetAging program, as well as generous funding of my research through MaxNetAging, this research would have taken a different, possibly less ambitious direction. In the context of MaxNetAging, I appreciate the extensive discussions on my topic and the connections and institutional resources I was able to use. A bottleneck of any discourse network analysis is the manual coding effort required to annotate thousands of political statements. My student assistant Frank Kaiser supported me with this challenging task and provided excellent research assistance to this project. Research findings can only be important if there is a demand for them. I wish to thank the numerous people who have used my methods and companion software DISCOURSE NETWORK ANALYZER in their own research and who have provided feedback and reported bugs, especially Dana R. Fisher (University of Maryland, College Park), 0effrey P. Broadbent (University of Minnesota), and other members of the Comparing Climate Change Policy Networks (COMPON) project, where discourse network analysis could be employed in a comparative setting. The dissertation won two prestigious prizes in ...
Autorenporträt
Philip Leifeld ist Senior Researcher an der Eawag, dem Wasserforschungsinstitut des ETH-Bereichs, und an der Universität Bern am Institut für Politikwissenschaft.
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