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P O L I T I C A L S T U D I E S : 2 0 1 3 VO L 6 1 , 3 0 1 3 1 8
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2012.00967.x

Taking Discourse Seriously: Discursive

Institutionalism and Post-structuralist
Discourse Theory
post_967

301..318

Francisco Panizza

Romina Miorelli

London School of Economics and Political Science

University of Westminster

The article seeks to add to the growing contribution of discursive approaches to the study of political institutions by
analysing the possibilities for cross-fertilisation between discursive institutionalism and post-structuralist discourse
theory. AnalysingVivien Schmidts version of discursive institutionalism, it argues that Schmidts concept of discourse
results in a model of explanation of institutional change that overlooks questions about the relations between power,
politics and discourse. It further argues that while post-structural discourse theory has made important contributions
to the understanding of the discursive nature of social practices, it has so far failed fully to take on board the
institutional dimension of politics. It concludes that an integration of Schmidts insights on discursive institutionalism
with post-structuralist discourse theory allows a more rounded analysis of the political dimension of institutions and
of the institutional dimension of politics, as well as a better understanding of institutional change. To illustrate our
arguments we draw on our own research to analyse the relations between discourse and institutions in the 2002
presidential electoral campaign in Brazil and in Argentinas poverty reduction policies in the 1990s.

Keywords: discursive institutionalism; post-structural discourse theory; institutions; discourse; institutional change
This article seeks to add to the growing contribution of discursive approaches to the study
of politics. More specifically, it looks at how post-structuralist discourse theory (PSDT) can
contribute to better explanations of institutional change. Discursive institutionalism (DI) is
an umbrella concept for a vast range of approaches to the study of institutions with
significant variations in their theoretical and methodological understanding of the relations
between ideas, discourses and institutions (Schmidt, 2010). Our starting point is a critique
of Vivien Schmidts (2008; 2009; 2010) valuable attempt to integrate a discursive perspective with other varieties of new institutionalism (NI).We focus on Schmidts works on DI
because of her particular concern with exploring the discursive foundations of DI and her
acknowledgement of the potential of discourse theory (including PSDT) to contribute to
the theorisation of processes of ideational change (Schmidt, 2010, pp. 145).
Central to Schmidts undertaking is the reclamation of discourse as an important
analytical tool for the study of the relations between ideas and institutions. Schmidt notes
that mainstream political scientists have been reluctant to add discourse to their consideration of ideas because, as she puts it,it conjures the exaggerated visions of postmodernists
and post-structuralists who are assumed (often unfairly) to interpret texts without contexts and to understand reality as all words, whatever the deeds (Schmidt, 2008, pp. 3045).
Contrary to these critics we agree with Schmidts suggestion that including a discursive
dimension into political analysis can make a useful contribution to the understanding of
processes of institutional change (Schmidt, 2010, p. 15). It is our view, however, that
Schmidts understanding of discourse and of its implications for the study of institutions
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results in a model of explanation of institutional change that does not properly address some
fundamental questions about the relations between power, politics and discourse that are
necessary to make change endogenous to her model.We further argue that while PSDT has
made an important contribution to the understanding of the discursive nature of political
practices, it has in turn failed fully to take on board the institutional dimension of politics,
resulting in a view of politics that is largely devoid of institutions. We conclude that an
integration of the insights of DI with those of PSDT allows for a more rounded analysis of
the discursive dimension of institutions and of the institutional dimension of politics, and
a better understanding of processes of institutional change.
The article is structured as follows: the first section examines some of the more common
criticisms of PSDT and clarifies PSDTs arguments about the discursive nature of society.
The second and third sections look at the failures of DI and PSDT to integrate fully the
analysis of politics, power and institutions in explaining institutional change and suggest
ways by which they can be brought together. In the fourth section we use examples from
our own research to illustrate our arguments by analysing the relations between discourse
and institutions in two different institutional settings: the 2002 presidential electoral campaign in Brazil (Panizza, 2004) and Argentinas poverty reduction policies in the 1990s
(Miorelli, 2008).

Taking PSDT Seriously

Before critically examining Schmidts understanding of the relations between discourse,
power and institutional change it is necessary to dispel some commonly held misconceptions about PSDTs claims on the discursive nature of society. Postmodernism and poststructuralism are extremely broad categories which are difficult to define. PSDT theory
emerged in the 1980s as a reaction against the structural determinism and economic
reductionism of certain versions of Marxism and against the methodological individualism
of much of modern social theory. The outcome of this enterprise has not been a coherent
set of well-defined theoretical concepts, analytical categories and methodological tools that
will fit neatly into a school of thought, but an open-ended research agenda that shares a
number of theoretical and methodological assumptions with other so-called constructivist
approaches to political analysis, including DI.1
At the core of PSDT is a relational conception of society. This approach was influenced
by the French structural linguist Ferdinand de Saussures relational theory of language.
Saussure (1983) argued that language is a system of formal differences in which the meaning
of a word is not determined by its reference to an underlying entity (the signified) but by
its relational placing in the web-like structure of language. Following the insights of
linguistic theory, PSDT sees society as a meaningful, discursively constructed, system of
differential relations between its constitutive elements. However, while in Saussures theory
of language the meaning of a word is fully determined by its relational location in the
structure of a given language, PSDT emphasises that social orders are never fully structured
but open to political interventions and dislocations that make it impossible to ground them
in an ultimate foundation, hence the post-structuralist label.
Given the linguistic roots of PSDT and its claims about the discursively constructed
nature of society, it is not difficult to understand its critics charge that, as Schmidt (2008,
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p. 305) puts it, PSDT conceives reality as all words, that is, the accusation of idealism. The
claim, however, is based on a misrepresentation of PSDTs argument about the discursive
nature of social relations. Post-structural discourse theorists reject the argument that in
stating that the realm of discourse is coextensive with that of society PSDT reduces
everything to thought and language. PSDT practitioners do not ignore the existence of a
reality outside our heads and external to our thoughts. Their argument is not that
everything is discursive or linguistic, but that for things to be intelligible they must exist as
part of a wider framework of meaning, that is, of a discourse (Derrida, 1988, p. 148;
Howarth, 2000; Torfing, 1999).
An example taken from Schmidts analysis of what is material and what is real will help
us to illustrate this point. Schmidt (2008, p. 318) uses Searles (1955) distinction between
brute facts, such as mountains, which are material because they exist regardless of whether or
not sentient (intentional) agents acknowledge their existence or have words for them, and
social facts, such as institutions, to make an important point. She notes that institutions are not
material because, as different from mountains, they do not exist without sentient agents.
However, she claims that institutions are nonetheless real in the sense that they constitute
interests and cause things to happen. PSDT would further argue that, while brute facts (such
as mountains) are out there and exist independently of whether we exist or not, socially
they are not just brute facts. Mountains are meaningful objects, whose material entity can
only be grasped by their inscription into certain frameworks of meaning (i.e. discourses). In
the case of a mountain, the discursive frames could range from the geological discourse of
its mineral properties to the geographical discourse of height and range and from the
religious discourse about its spiritual properties to the sporting one of its skiing resorts.
According to PSDT, discourses involve political struggles to inscribe and partially fix the
meaning of a term within a certain discursive chain to the exclusion of others. For instance,
if the meaning of a mountain is inscribed in an ecological or religious discursive frame it
could effectively make unthinkable its commercial exploitation.
The claim that post-structuralists interpret texts without contexts is hardly more sustainable. On the contrary, PSDT conceives meaning as contextual and variable. Its relational
theory of discourse is aimed at understanding how context affects text. The elements of a
discourse are articulated differently by different actors and their meanings change in
accordance with contextual factors, such as time and other circumstances. Jacques Derrida
argues that the essential iterability of any sign (linguistic or non-linguistic) means that it can
always be detached from the chain of signification into which it is inserted and grafted on
to alternative chains:Every sign ... can be cited, put between quotation marks; in so doing
it can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner
which is absolutely illimitable (Derrida, 1988, p. 12).
The emphasis on the contextually changing nature of discursive iterations leaves PSDT
open to a further charge of absolute relativism. Derridas claim that iterations can engender
infinite textual possibilities appears to give credence to the argument that PSDT has no way
of making valid cognitive or normative claims about a given social order. The charge is
compounded by PSDTs relational theory of society which argues that society has no
ultimate foundation or overarching logic that determines its structure, be it the will of
God, the economy, class struggle, human nature or possessive individualism. Anti 2012 The Authors. Political Studies 2012 Political Studies Association
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foundationalism leads to stressing the historicity and contingency of discursively constructed social relations, which amounts to considering politics as the foundation of social
order. Schmidts analysis of human rights provides a good example of how it is possible to
make normative claims without resorting to an ultimate source of normative authority, as
well as pointing to some unexamined and unacknowledged common ground between DI
and PSDT. The cultural and religious pluralism that characterises the modern world means
that it is not possible to ground human rights on religious or culturally determined moral
principles. But as Schmidt (2008, p. 321) notes, it is precisely the argument that human
rights (as any other social norm) are intersubjective and discursively (i.e. politically)
constructed that makes it possible for them to be adopted across cultures by, as she puts it,
invoking similarities as well as differences in cultural norms and identities.
Taken to the extreme, anti-foundationalism leads to a view of society as a totally
unstructured site of contingent relations in a state of permanent flux. However, the claim
that society has no ultimate grounding does not mean that social orders are essentially
chaotic. PSDT argues that there is always a relative structuration of the social resulting from
discursive operations that limit contingency by institutionalising the power relations of a
particular social order (Torfing, 1999, p. 153). Contingency is thus limited by social
institutions that, to use the Anthony Giddens quotation cited by Schmidt (2008, p. 315),
have an inherently discursive dimension.
Having clarified some key misconceptions about PSDT arguments concerning the
discursive nature of society, we turn now to a critique of DIs and PSDTs views on the
relations between discourse, power and institutions.

DI: From the Power of Ideas to the Power of Discourse

Studies that stressed the role of ideas in the formation and transformation of institutions
introduced a discursive dimension to NI in the 1990s (Hall, 1993; Hay, 2001; Risse et al.,
1999; Sikkink, 1991). Recent theoretical developments have criticised these early ideascentred approaches, arguing that they regard ideas as fully finished concepts, exogenous to
the phenomenon under analysis, and as independent or supplementary variables to structural or interest-based variables. Critics assert that ideas are meaningful only by reference to
a certain system of interpretation or discourse (Kjaer and Pedersen, 2001, p. 220), and hence
cannot be conceived as fully finished realities external to the discourses that embody them.
Discourse, therefore, started to emerge as the backbone of a new institutionalist perspective
known as discursive institutionalism (Campbell and Pedersen, 2001, pp. 914). However, as
Schmidt notes, there is no consensus about what is meant by discourse.
Schmidt (2010, p. 15) defines discourse as the exchange of ideas, understood as a generic
term that encompasses not only the substantive content of ideas but also the interactive
processes by which ideas are conveyed (Schmidt, 2008, p. 305). She then classifies ideas
the substantive content of discourses by their levels of generality and types of content, and
discourses the process of conveying ideas in two basic forms: the coordinative discourse
among policy actors and the communicative discourse between political actors and the
public. She argues that the importance of introducing the notion of discourse to the study
of the role of ideas in institutional change lies in its bringing into the analyses of institutions
the processes of discursive communication that convey and legitimise ideas (Schmidt, 2008,
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pp. 30910). According to Schmidt, discursive power comes from the ability of sentient
agents with good ideas to use discourse effectively, whether to build a discursive coalition
for reform against entrenched interests in the coordinative policy sphere or to inform and
orient the public in the communicative sphere (Schmidt, 2009, p. 533).
Schmidt makes a compelling criticism of the understanding of politics solely in terms of
the interrelationships of power and interests among strategic actors and argues that politics
can also be explained in terms of the ideas and discursive interactions of sentient actors
(Schmidt, 2009, p. 529). Yet her concept of discourse and the related notions of discursive
power and agency need further examining if we want to advance the understanding of
institutional change.
Schmidts notion of discourse, as comprising both ideational and interactive aspects,
followed by a subsequent distinction between the two that effectively limits discourse to a
communicative vessel for conveying substantive ideas, is an unsatisfactory way of presenting
the relations between ideas, power and discourse. According to PSDT, the relation between
ideas and discourse is not one of content and form. Discourse is not a neutral medium of
signs and symbols that simply connects ideas and objects. Discursive practices involve
binding together heterogeneous ideational elements that have no necessary logic relations
among themselves and were not previously thought of as belonging together in a relational
ensemble. Thus, discursive practices enable actors to experience and think about the world
in certain ways. In doing so, discourses crystallise power struggles and set the parameters of
what is sayable and indeed thinkable in a given social order (Laclau, 1980).
Schmidts understanding of the persuasive power of discourse is also problematic.
Rightly in our view, she holds that ideas and discourse cannot be considered to the
exclusion of power (Schmidt, 2010, p. 18). As she puts it, public choices result not only
from the power clash among interests but also from the battle of ideas through discourse
and deliberation (Schmidt, 2009, p. 541). Her view of the processes of deliberation owes
a great deal to Jrgen Habermas notion of communicative action. Yet it departs from it
as she argues that communicative reason (that according to Habermas rules the sphere of
ideas, deliberation and argumentation) is not incompatible with instrumental reason
(which rules the sphere of interests and bargaining) (Schmidt, 2010, p. 18). In a view of
persuasion explicitly related to Gramscis concept of hegemony, she argues that in communicating their decisions to the citizens policy makers need to show that the ideas
underpinning policies are not just the more appropriate to resolve the problems at stake,
but that they are also in line with the prevalent normative ideas, worldwide views and
values of a given polity (Schmidt, 2008, p. 309). Framing, counter-framing and other
articulatory practices are critical to the success of ideas and, as Schmidt (2010, pp. 189)
acknowledges, the outcome of deliberation is not necessarily a democratic one. For
Schmidt persuasion is achieved through processes of discussion and deliberation in which
reasonable and evidence-based arguments prevail and the success of ideas is ultimately
related to the relevance of ideas at hand, their adequacy, applicability, appropriateness and
resonance (Schmidt, 2008, p. 311).
In contrast, PSDT stresses that power is embedded in the relations of antagonism and
exclusion that are the defining political dimension of discursive practices. As David
Howarth and Yannis Stavrakakis (2000, p. 4) put it:
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Discourses are concrete systems of social relations and practices that are intrinsically political, as
their formation is an act of radical institution, which involves the construction of antagonisms
and the drawing of political frontiers between insiders and outsiders ... [T]herefore, they
always involve the exercise of power, as their constitution involves the exclusion of certain
possibilities and a consequent structuring of the relations between different social agents
(emphasis added).

The implications of Schmidts view of discursive power are apparent in her analysis of
the contributions of discourse to the success or failure of ideas. Schmidt (2008, p. 311)
argues that discourse contributes to the success or failure of ideas by how it articulates
its substantive content. However, she fails to take fully into account that articulation is a
relatively arbitrary process of discursive construction which entails not only logical
operations involving the protocols of demonstration but also, and crucially, political persuasion. As such, it implies an understanding of the battle of ideas (Schmidt, 2009) that
goes beyond a purely cognitive model of the acquisition and accumulation of facts.
Persuasion works by making somebody give up a set of beliefs in favour of another by
offering a more or less thoroughgoing re-description of the world which, on a pragmatic
basis, presents the new set of beliefs as the more suitable, appropriate or likely (Rorty,
1989, cited in Torfing, 1999, p. 68). As Jacob Torfing puts it, persuasive re-descriptions are
likely to provide good reasons and strong motivations for someone to adopt a new set
of beliefs. Yet re-descriptions do not imply establishing a causal link with an absolute
truth as the ultimate ground for political decisions (Laclau, 1990, p. 31; Torfing, 1999, p.
68). As Aletta Norval (2006, p. 241) argues, drawing on Wittgenstein, even the process of
providing reasons involves a moment of change which cannot be accounted for in terms
of providing reasons. However, as Norval notes, the end result is not an ungrounded
presupposition. It is at this point that political identification assumes its relevance. As she
puts it, political change involves a change in political identification, a change in the
understanding of ones self and ones place in relation to others and to a set of wider
practices (Norval, 2006, p. 243; see also pp. 2445). Thus, political persuasion is always,
to some extent, a conversion and it is because persuasion pursues conversion that we can
speak of the coercive force of persuasion (Laclau, 1999, p. 97; see also Torfing, 1999, p.
307).
PSDTs understanding of discursive power as involving political identification can make a
significant contribution to the analysis of institutional change and of the role of agency in it.
At the centre of Schmidts explanation of change is the sentient actor as an autonomous,
self-conscious, unified, reflexive and rational individual (Schmidt, 2010, p. 17). For Schmidt,
institutional change is explained by the foreground discursive abilities through which
sentient actors may change (or maintain) their institutions following a logic of communication ... a generic term for what Habermas (1996) calls communicative action (Schmidt,
2010, p. 15). This ability enables agents to think, speak, and act outside their institutions
while they are inside them, to deliberate about institutional rules even as they use them, and
to persuade one another to change those institutions or to maintain them (Schmidt, 2008, p.
314; 2010, p. 4). As she puts it (Schmidt, 2008, p. 314),it is because of this communicative
logic that DI is better able to explain institutional change and continuity than the older three
new institutionalisms. However, Schmidt never convincingly explains why actors would
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seek change or what the sources of their foreground discursive abilities are (Schmidt, 2008,
p. 307).
PSDTs notion of agency differs from the individualistic assumptions that underpin
Schmidts concept of foreground abilities. The distinction between identity and identification is at the heart of PSDTs conception of political agency.2 Social identities refer to
the subjects location within an institutional structure as workers, parents, consumers, etc.
As part of an institutional ensemble social identities are complex (individuals have several
overlapping and partially contradictory identities), relatively fixed and sedimented.
However, social structures can never confer a closed, self-contained and fully fixed identity.
Identity, at both the personal and political levels, is only the name of what we desire but can
never fully obtain. Identification, in turn, is the name of the practice that supports and
maintains attempts to crystallise identities (Stavrakakis, 2001). The more the foundation of
the social is put into question, the less are sedimented social practices able to ensure the
social reproduction of identities and the more we recognise that a dimension of construction and creation is inherent in all social practices. Since the objects of identification in adult
life include political ideologies and other social constructs, the process of identification is
constitutive of socio-political life (Stavrakakis, 1999). It is precisely the failure of the
structure to confer full identity that compels the subject to take decisions within an
undecidable terrain (Howarth, 2000, p. 109) and therefore constitutes the condition of
possibility of institutional change. However, as we argue in the following section, PSDTs
underdeveloped concept of political institutions is an obstacle to taking full advantage of its
own insights to explain the politics of institutional change.

PSDT: From Heroic Politics to the Politics of Everyday Change

If Schmidts narrow concept of discourse limits her analysis of the relations between
discourse, power and institutions, PSDT equally fails to integrate the three of them by
overlooking the institutional aspects of politics (Mouzelis, 1988).To substantiate our claim
we need first to examine in more detail PSDTs notion of politics. Ernesto Laclau closely
follows Carl Schmitts (1996 [1932]) original notion of politics, which is built around the
friendenemy antagonism. According to Laclau, while institutions are structured as relational systems of differences, politics is based on relations of antagonism that subvert the
institutional space and set up the political frontiers that are the condition for political
agency. Relations of antagonism emerge in situations in which there is an accumulation of
unfulfilled demands: the inability of the institutional system to address popular demands in
a differential way (i.e. in isolation from each other) may lead to their unification through
a process of discursive articulation into a chain of equivalences as equally unmet demands in
antagonism to the institutional system (Howarth, 2000, pp. 1067; Laclau, 2005a, pp. 734).
As Laclau (2005a, p. 154) put it,Since the construction of the people is the political act par
excellence as opposed to pure administration within an institutional framework the sine
qua non requirements of the political are the constitution of antagonistic frontiers within
the social. To the extent that institutions are structured as systems of differences there is
little room for antagonism and thus for politics in institutional orders.While institutions can
process change through the expansion of differences, this change would be part of a
conservative, administrative, rather than political logic aimed at preventing more radical
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political subjectivities from emerging. Underlining that politics cannot be about institutions
Laclau equates both politics and the political with populism (Arditi, 2010; Laclau, 2005a, p.
xi, p. 68; 2005b, p. 47). If politics is populism and populism is anti-institutional by definition,
then politics cannot be about institutions.
Laclaus notion of politics corresponds with what Norval (2006, p. 245) herself a
member of the Essex School calls a heroic conception of the subject. This conception
is grounded on the distinction between, on the one hand,subject positions, understood as
the sedimented identities located in the structure as a result of their everyday participation
in social life, and the subject as an autonomous political agent, on the other. As Norval
notes, the subject is present only in those rare occasions when new political grammars are
instituted through acts of identification, decisions are taken and popular identities are
constructed through relations of antagonism that simplify the social order into two dichotomous camps (Norval, 2006, p. 245). According to this either/or distinction, politics is best
expressed by the (populist) leader leading the people in the streets and the politics of mass
protest rather than by the local councillor working in the community, the everyday politics
of civil society organisations or political parties struggles around the politics and policies of
the welfare state.
The emphasis on the constitution of political agency involving a radical break with
existing institutional arrangements risks leaving the political out of everyday politics in
highly institutionalised political orders in which subjects would appear to be just blind
followers of administrative-bounded rationalities. However, the inability of PSDT to incorporate politics within institutions appears to be incongruent with its argument that social
structures are never fully closed systems of differences but rather incomplete and temporarily sutured human constructs. Seen this way, politics cannot be other than integral to
institutions both in times of crisis and in times of relative political stability. Clearly politics
plays a more autonomous role when institutional systems are in crisis and human agency
can usually (but not always) more easily free itself from institutional constraints. Yet PSDTs
emphasis on the constitution of political subjectivities as requiring a radical rupture with
existing institutional arrangements blurs the importance of everyday politics in making
possible not just the maintenance but also the reactivation and redefinition of the original
moment of political identification (Norval, 2006, pp. 2469).
However, a more nuanced reading of PSDTs works allows us to think about the politics
of institutional change in a more productive way.While references to institutions are scant
throughout PSDT literature, PSDT scholars have dealt extensively with a number of
concepts that are closely related to that of institutions, such as structures (Howarth, 2000,
p. 17, p. 19, p. 115;Torfing, 1999, pp. 626),systems of social organization (Laclau, 1990, p.
172) and social logics (Glynos and Howarth, 2007). PSDT scholar David Howarth defines
institutions as sedimented discourses that have become relatively permanent and durable.
As he puts it, there are not qualitative distinctions between discourses, only differences in
their degree of stability (Howarth, 2000, p. 120). The notion that institutions are not
different from other discourses but just more sedimented ones is true at a high level of
abstraction but does not advance its understanding too much. There is an analytical
specificity to institutions that requires further elaboration. Laclau (1990, p. 172) argues that
systems of social organisation are attempts to reduce the margins of undecidability in order
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to make way for actions and decisions that are as coherent as possible. On a similar line, Jason
Glynos and David Howarth (2007, p. 137, p. 139) introduce the concept of social logics,
which are defined as rule following logics that characterise the overall pattern and
coherence of a social practice. Because social structures are always incomplete, they can
never fully structure the social order and determine the identity of agents and their ability
to act (Glynos and Howarth, 2007, p. 137; 2008, p. 164).
From this admittedly brief examination of PSDTs notion of institutions and other
closely related concepts it could be suggested that it shares significant common ground with
DIs notion of institutions, defined as rules about acting in the world. According to DI,
institutions are both structures that constrain actors and constructs created and changed by
actors (Schmidt, 2008, p. 314). As discursive constructs, institutions sediment certain rules
about acting in the world and deem them authoritative within a given social order, while
at the same time being open to change. The question remains, however, of how political
change can be seen as occurring within institutions from a PSDT perspective. A focus on
the notion of dislocation emerges as the key to incorporating politics within institutional
analyses. In his work Laclau blurs the dividing line between equivalence and difference and
thus between institutions and politics. As he puts it,[While] equivalence and difference are
ultimately incompatible with each other, none the less, they require each other as necessary
conditions for the construction of the social. The social is nothing but the locus of this
irreducible tension (Laclau, 2005a, p. 80). Dislocation is the key concept for understanding
how this tension can contribute to political change within institutions. As a term synonymous with the incomplete character of social structures (Laclau, 1990, p. 60) dislocations are
made visible by processes or events that cannot be domesticated, symbolised or integrated
within a particular institutional order (Torfing, 1999, p. 301).While dislocation constitutes
the condition of possibility for institutional change, following Norval, even when changes
are quite radical, the dislocation does not need to follow a great event. More often than
not, it will take the form of a multitude of different practices, which, when taken together,
make possible a different way of looking at things by allowing the recognition of the
discontinuous within the continuous and vice versa (Norval, 2006, pp. 24950). Institutions,
therefore, are subject to dislocations that can lead to a variety of outcomes from incremental
change to deeper systemic crisis. Colin Hays (2001, p. 200) conceptualisation of institutional change as punctuated evolution constitutes a fruitful contribution by DI to the
understanding of this process. He argues that in an institutional environment policy evolves
through the iterative unfolding and adaptation of a paradigm to changing circumstances,
punctuated periodically by crisis and paradigm shifts. As he put it: Time within this
[institutional] framework is textured and contoured, alternating (though in no preordained
or predetermined manner) between decisive, intense and contested moments of crisis and
paradigm shift on the one hand, and longer, slower, more drawn out periods of iterative
change and path dependent institutional evolution on the other (Hay, 2001, p. 203).
While all institutions are incomplete and thus dislocated to a larger or lesser degree, the
use of dislocation in institutional analysis should refer to the moment of awareness of the
open character of the structure that makes visible its contingent nature. By focusing on a
notion of dislocation as the moment in which the openness of the structure becomes
evident, change can be seen as coming from the outside of the institution without,
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however, being completely alien to it. As incomplete structures, institutions make possible
the activation of contingent forms of subjectivity and multiple forms of identification. It is
the space or gap in the structures and the failure of institutions to confer full identities that
make change possible and it is the political character of discursive articulations that makes
change happen also in everyday policy decision making. Because actors are not reducible
either to structural clones or to autonomous wilful beings, their identification with a
multiplicity of incomplete institutional orders makes possible that the actors so-called
background discursive abilities (Schmidt, 2008, p. 314; 2010, p. 15) in a given institutional
order could be reactivated by the very same actor as foreground abilities in a different one.
The next sections case studies are meant to show how a combination of DI and PSDT
insights can contribute to the analysis of institutional change. The first case (Panizza, 2004)
looks at political persuasion and political identification in communicative discourse
(Schmidt, 2008), a key question for both DI and PSDT. It shows how former Brazilian
President Luiz Incio Lula da Silvas iteration of change in the 2002 presidential campaign
in Brazil reassured the markets and more centrist voters while simultaneously allowing his
left-wing supporters to identify with his campaign promises. The second case (Miorelli,
2008) is about coordinative discourse (Schmidt, 2008) in the making and implementation
of poverty alleviation in Argentina. It shows the importance of everyday politics in effecting
institutional change through what Hay (2001) would call a process of punctuated evolution.

Case Studies: Bringing Politics Back to Institutional Change

During the 2002 presidential electoral campaign in Brazil, Lula da Silva, the candidate of the
left-wing Partido dosTrabalhadores (PT, the Workers party) had to tread a particularly difficult
path between his followers expectations of a radical rupture with the political and
economic status quo and the need to appeal to moderate sectors of the electorate in the
context of a country that was facing considerable market uneasiness about a possible victory
of the left. While, as Javier Santiso (2006) notes, Wall Street is not a uniform epistemic
community, as Lula da Silvas chances of winning the election increased a strong consensus
emerged among market analysts that a triumph of the left represented a high risk of default,
which was reflected in the sharp rise in the spread on Brazilian bonds (Santiso, 2006, pp.
298301). This situation placed Lula da Silvas communicative discourse at the intersection
of two powerful social institutions: the markets and electoral democracy. To deal with the
contradictory demands of markets and electorates Lula da Silva drew from three different
institutional frames of reference that shaped his political identity: his past political experience as a radical union leader; his current role as a political candidate; and his putative future
condition as a statesman. Drawing from these repositories of meaning Lula da Silva made
the iteration of change the nodal point of his campaign and in doing so made the
campaign a political struggle over the meaning of change itself.
The analysis of Lula da Silvas electoral speeches and other documents shows how time
and again he iterated the call for change to reach addressees that had different expectations
about its scope and limits. By iterating the call for change in different contexts, Lula da Silva
re-signified the meaning of change itself. Particularly illustrative of this strategy was a crucial
document of his campaign, the so-called Carta ao povo brasileiro (Letter to the Brazilian
people). The letter was published by Lula da Silva at a time when the outgoing centre-right
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government was in delicate negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for
assistance to prevent the precipitation of a financial crisis. A public commitment from all
main presidential candidates that a future government would abide by the terms of the
agreement was seen as crucial for the success of these negotiations. In the letter Lula da Silva
started by claiming that Brazil wants to change and he continued by reaffirming that the
Brazilian people wanted change for good (mudar para valer), a term that evoked the notion
of change as rupture. He presented change as a new beginning by rejecting any explicit
continuity (continuismo) with the status quo. He reinforced this image by claiming that the
current [free market] model was exhausted and that there was a powerful popular will to
put an end to the current economic and political cycle. He articulated change to a number
of themes that had figured prominently in his partys traditional radical discourse, such as
economic growth and social justice. But traces of a different meaning of the term were
already to be found in this radical imagining of change, as he also reasserted his commitment to fight inflation and pay the external debt at the cost of a tight fiscal policy, a policy
that was already being followed by the outgoing government. He stated that his government
would honour the countrys financial contracts and obligations, and stressed his disposition
to preserve whatever primary budget surplus that would be necessary in order to prevent
an increase in the internal debt that would destroy confidence in the capacity of the
government to honour its commitments, which was precisely what the IMF demanded
(Panizza, 2004, p. 474).
The paradox of the letter lay in that, while it was couched in the language of change as
a radical rupture with the outgoing governments economic policies, the markets interpreted Lula da Silvas promise of change not as a threat of a break with the free market
economic model but as a commitment to continuity by enacting market-friendly policies,
such as honouring the countrys external debt and upholding fiscal discipline. The letter
was widely perceived as a turning point in the relationship between the PTs candidate and
the markets, which slowly but surely began to change their perceptions of the threat to their
interests represented by a possible Lula victory. So arguably, a letter that had as its explicit
addressee the Brazilian people, and which claimed that the people rejected any form of
continuity with the existing economic model, had the markets as its ultimate addressee; and
a document that used change as its key signifier was construed by these unacknowledged
addressees as a commitment to continuity in key macroeconomic policies (Panizza, 2004,
p. 474), thus allowing what Norval calls a change of perspective in the markets view of
Lula.
The brief summary above of Lula da Silvas iteration of change serves to exemplify how
political persuasion cannot be reduced either to a process of logical argumentation or to
political manipulation. Lula da Silvas use of the signifier change in a document aimed at
signalling significant elements of continuity in economic policy can be regarded as a prima
facie case of the latter, that is, of a manipulative politician saying one thing while meaning
the opposite. However, Lula da Silva did not lie in the letter, nor did he promise one thing
while intending another.What he did was use change as a floating signifier (Laclau, 1990, p.
28) by articulating it to different political elements that over-endowed it with meaning.
Within this iterated surplus of meaning the meaning of change was interpreted by different
addressees the markets, his core political supporters, moderate voters according to their
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own codes of reception, thus allowing for multiple (and partially contradictory) forms of
political identification with the candidate.
Our second example looks at how Schmidts notion of coordinative discourse can be
complemented by PSDTs insights in analysing institutional change. To this effect the case
study focuses on the making and implementation of poverty reduction policies in 1990s
Argentina in the context of a government strongly committed to neo-liberal reform
(Miorelli, 2008). In 1993 the government of Argentina created a national agency to
coordinate poverty reduction policies the National Secretariat for Social Development
(SDS, Secretara de Desarrollo Social). However, the governments neo-liberalism implied the
retrenchment of the state, which prevented the allocation of fresh funds for the newly
created agency (Repetto, 2000, p. 211). Financial constraints led the SDS authorities to
resort to loans from the multilateral development banks (MDBs), such as the World Bank
(WB) and the Inter American Development Bank (IADB), to fund their projects. The
MDBs and the national governments commitment to neo-liberal reform required a
significant conceptual and practical change in the approach to poverty that had been
dominant until the early 1990s. This approach was grounded in a developmentalist model
of economic growth (Nosiglia, 1983) in which the state played a central role both in the
economy and in social policy provision. Poverty was tackled through a state system of
universal health, education and pensions provision. To deal with extreme poverty and
socio-economic emergencies, state provision was complemented by social assistance and by
the work of social organisations that were supposed eventually to be replaced by state
services once economic conditions allowed.
The Plan Social 1995 (SDS, 1995) was the policy document that set out the SDS
perspective and objectives for policy alleviation for the 1990s. The neo-liberal approachs
focus on preserving individual freedom and on minimising the role of the state in social
policy provision clashed with the previously dominant collectivist and state-centred
approach to poverty. The document was an attempt to mainstream the new neo-liberal
approach by articulating it with discursive elements of the statist model. An analysis of some
of the Plans dispositions illustrates the argument that it was not just the technical adequacy
and logical consistency of the documents ideas that were the conditions to its success but
also the way the agents redefined their meaning in relation to new systems of differences,
equivalences and exclusions.
The Plans main aim was to improve the management and coordination of poverty
reduction policies, which followed from the neo-liberal objectives of avoiding further
state expenditure and making efficient use of already available plans. Targeting and the
participation of civil society organisations were the main mechanisms for rationalising
the use of resources. The Plan shows the fundamental discursive operations at play in the
process of legitimising and mainstreaming these mechanisms. In order to introduce targeting the selection of specific groups of the population as beneficiaries of state policies
the Plan created new relations of antagonism and equivalences. Targeting was presented
in stark contrast to universal provision by associating the latter with inefficiency and lack
of technical rigour. The neo-liberal approach also involved a reversal in the relationship
between the state and social organisations predominant in the statist model in which the
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tralise the provision of social services. In contrast, under neo-liberalism social organisations were expected gradually to replace the interventionist state to become the main
providers of social benefits. This volte-face was legitimised by recourse to the concept of
solidarity, which was presented in the Plan as the basis for social organisation.
Solidarity was the conceptual bridge between the pre-1990s state-centred discourse
and its 1990s neo-liberal successor (SDS, 1995, p. 9). In the process of transferring
solidarity from one discursive chain to the other, the concept acquired a new meaning.
The communitarian connotations of the concept which relate it to the ties that unite
people in a community who have mutual concerns (Archard, 2006, p. 188) seem incompatible with the individualism that is at the core of neo-liberalism. However, the Plan
made solidarity the nodal point of a chain of equivalences that assimilated the new
technically and administratively skilled civil society organisations preferred by neoliberalism to the traditional social organisations that had been active in the state-centred
model of provision. As the Plan put it, social policy can be effective as long as it is
inserted in a global framework in which solidarity is an underpinning value and in itself
helps to reinforce social organisation (SDS, 1995, p. 9). In the new strategy, the civil
society organisations role was restricted to the administration of funds and the provision
of technical advice. Typically, funds were allocated for specific projects. Neither the
organisations nor their staff were allocated direct funds or wages, as their work was
expected to be done in the spirit of solidarity for the good of the community. Therefore, in the context of the neo-liberal 1990s, solidarity began to be understood principally
as voluntary or unpaid work, as it appeared in the widespread use of the term trabajo
solidario (solidarity work) (Candiano, 2002; CENOC, 1999, p. 65; Orlowsky de Amadeo,
2002).
The Plans new political grammar produced a change in perspective (Norval, 2006)
that facilitated institutional change in the poverty reduction policy area through a process
of punctuated evolution (Hay, 2001). Its discursive articulations responded to both politically contingent and strategic factors but, crucially, they were shaped by its key policy
designers complex social identities. The creation of the SDS and its lack of funds
triggered important struggles over funding among different Cabinet agencies. The decision to involve the MDBs was critical to making the neo-liberal approach hegemonic in
the poverty reduction policy area. But it was the then Secretary for Social Development,
Eduardo Amadeo, who played a key role in mainstreaming neo-liberalism. He had been
a highly regarded president of a provincial state bank, he was a development economist
and also a Peronist party militant with experience in grass-roots politics. These
overlapping social identities allowed him to draw from different repositories of meaning
to articulate old and new elements to the new approach to poverty. His experience as a
banker contributed to his reputation as an efficient administrator and familiarised
him with the latest trends in applying for international funds. At the same time,
his strategy of privileging grass-roots social organisations and the strategy of putting
solidarity as the nodal point of the Plan can be traced back to his Peronist political
identity. Thus, the apparently incompatible notions of solidarity, efficiency and social
organisation were drawn together by an agent grounded in multiple institutional frames
of reference.
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PSDT argues that discourse should not be reduced to words but that it encompasses
all types of social practice. The implementation of the Plan Social from 1995 onwards
attests to the indivisibility of discursive practices, as the practical activity of policy implementation substantially altered the original discursive framework. One of the key changes
in the approach to poverty that took place during the implementation of the Plan was
the gradual displacement of autonomous civil society organisations (the agents favoured
by neo-liberalism to implement its anti-poverty strategy) by municipal governments,
state-linked social organisations and community leaders that doubled as political brokers
(Barral, 2002; Etchegaray, 2002; Pucci, 2002). In a mirror image of the re-articulation of
solidarity into a neo-liberal discourse, policy implementers legitimised the shift to a
politicised form of delivery in terms of neo-liberal efficiency goals. For instance, local
leaders were supposedly selected on the basis of their technical skills and knowledge of
their communities, which would allegedly ensure an efficient use of resources, and their
political links were presented as an advantage for negotiating resources for the community which could guarantee the sustainability of social interventions (Barral, 2002; Candiano, 2002; Richards, 2002). The involvement of municipal governments was justified in
terms of the increasing importance assigned by neo-liberal discourse in the second half
of the 1990s to decentralisation and to the strengthening of state institutions to facilitate
the workings of the markets (Cammack, 2004, p. 204).
Technical adequacy and logical consistency with neo-liberal goals were the arguments
used to justify the role assigned to state-linked community organisations, local brokers and
municipal governments in the implementation processes. However, the specific way in
which the new ideas were incorporated into the poverty alleviation strategy shows that
political struggles were embedded in the technical argumentations characteristic of coordinative discourse. The incorporation of municipal governments into the delivery process
reflected increasing demands from local mayors to be included in policy delivery and was
aimed at building political support for President Carlos Menems bid for re-election. By
working directly with municipal governments the president was able re-draw the line
between his political enemies and friends by bypassing provincial governors and the
Justicialista (Peronist) party political machine controlled by his main rival within the party,
Eduardo Duhalde (La Nacin, 1998) since the transfers enabled him to deliver funds
strategically to local mayors and party leaders who would support his candidacy. Municipalisation also reflected the governments need to address the demands behind growing
social unrest manifested in road blockades and other forms of contentious action by
territorially based unemployed workers and other social movements by funding community programmes in the areas more at risk of unrest.

Conclusions
By failing to take into account the contributions of PSDT to the understanding of political
discourse DI misses the opportunity to examine critically the possibilities of crossfertilisation between the two discursive approaches. This is unfortunate, given that in light
of Schmidts and other DI scholars analysis of the discursive dimension of institutions the
dividing line between post-structuralist discourse analysis and discursive institutionalist
approaches is often difficult to trace with any precision: they both seek a more dynamic
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analysis of politics; they have a similar constructivist view of the relations between subjects
and society; and they share a critical view of structuralist and individualistic approaches to
political analysis.
From our analysis above we would like to highlight three important contributions that
PSDT can make to DI. First, by arguing that discourses are intrinsically political and that
politics involves the discursive construction of antagonisms and political frontiers, PSDT
allows for a fuller understanding of discourse as constitutive of power and not just as a
complement to it. Second, the PSDT notion of incomplete structures and split subjects,
which implies that institutions can never determine the identity of agents and that failed
structural identities are what make institutional change possible, makes institutional change
endogenous to a DI analytical model. Third, PSDTs argument that institutional change
cannot be accounted for solely in terms of communicative reason and bargaining brings
about the importance of identifying the moment of conversion to understand change, a
moment in which political identification assumes a central role. Cross-cutting these contributions is the central argument of PSDT that the variety and incompleteness of institutional structures make it possible for agents to establish a plurality of relations of
identification which allows a better understanding of how, as Schmidt put it, agents can
think, speak and act outside institutions while they are inside them, and of what the sources
are of their foreground discursive abilities.
In turn DI can help PSDT to apply more systematically its own theoretical insights to the
analysis of institutions. PSDT argues that institutions contain a plurality of repressed and
contested meanings and practices and the possibility that these practices can be reactivated to
disrupt the institutional order is an important insight into processes of change in highly
institutionalised societies. PSDT analysis of change in such societies, however, remains
underdeveloped. DIs contention that change can take place in a variety of scenarios ranging
from the incremental change of everyday politics to deep systemic crises allows for a more
flexible understanding of the relation between politics and institutions. DIs more nuanced
understanding of the relations between change, dislocations and crises, as exemplified in
Hays notion of punctuated evolution,makes it possible to complement PSDTs emphasis on
the politics of political rupture with analyses of more institutionalised forms of political
activity. In addition, DIs extensive empirical analysis of the working of institutions (not least
by Schmidt herself) provides rich material for PSDT to advance its own understanding of
institutions. DI scholars empirical works have shown that institutions differ from other
discourses not just in terms of their durability but also in many other important dimensions,
such as their internal complexity and their external functions, their ability to shape vast
aspects of social and political life, their role in the constitution and maintenance of identities,
the ways they process change, and not least, how they shape interests.
As shown in our examples above, PSDT can provide a number of valuable theoretical and
methodological tools for the empirical analysis of institutional change, as well as incorporate
DIs insights into its own analysis. As the studies of Lula da Silvas electoral campaign and
of poverty reduction policies in Argentina show, changes in political grammars can be
achieved by the discursive articulation of heterogeneous elements that do not necessarily
have connections among themselves. Both the iteration of change in Lulas discourse and
the bringing together of efficiency, solidarity and social organisation in Argentinas Plan
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Social are cases in point. Also related to this is the role of the agents political identification
in making possible these discursive articulations. As noted in both cases, Lula da Silva and
Amadeo achieved a change in perspective by drawing discursive elements from a variety of
frameworks of meaning that were part of their complex institutional identities. Last but not
least, PSDTs argument that discourse should not be reduced to words but that it encompasses all types of social practice, and DIs contention that substantial change can take place
by the iterative unfolding and adaptation of institutions to changing circumstances (Hay,
2001, pp. 198203), are brought home by the analysis of the changes in Argentinas poverty
reduction policies during implementation.
This is not to ignore epistemological and theoretical differences between different
schools of discourse analysis, but equally significant theoretical and epistemological differences exist between varieties of new institutionalism, which nonetheless claim to share
significant common ground. As Torfing (1999, p. 292) argues, discourse theorists must
remain methodological bricoleurs and refrain from developing an all-purpose technique for
discourse analysis. There are of course dangers in theoretical and methodological eclecticism and different approaches should be critical of each other if our understanding of
politics is to make further progress. This article has highlighted what we regard as
weaknesses and shortcomings in both DI and PSDT but it has also sought to lower the
artificial barriers that prevent the exploration of their common possibilities.
(Accepted: 1 November 2011)
(Published online: 14 September 2012)
About the Authors
Francisco Panizza is Reader in Latin American and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and
Political Science. His research interests are left-of-centre politics in Latin America, populism and the politics of
economic change. Among his recent books are The Triumph of Politics: The Return of the Left in Venezuela, Bolivia and
Ecuador (with George Phillip; Polity, 2010) and Contemporary Latin America: Democracy and Development beyond the
Washington Consensus (Zed Books, 2009). Francisco Panizza, Department of Government, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK; email: F.E.Panizza@lse.ac.uk
Romina Miorelli is Lecturer in Latin American Politics and International Development at the University of
Westminster. She also has experience as a policy practitioner and as a consultant on development. Her research interests
include Latin American politics, governance and institutions, social policy, education and poverty reduction with a
current focus on cash transfers. She is a co-author of Monitoring Poverty and Social Exclusion: Labours FirstYears ( Joseph
Rowntree Foundation, 1999) and has published in leading international and peer-reviewed journals both in English
and in Spanish. Romina Miorelli, School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Languages, University of Westminster,
309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW, UK; email: R.Miorelli@westminster.ac.uk

Notes
1 In order to narrow down the critical analysis of PSDT this article focuses mainly on the so-called Essex School of discourse analysis
(Townshend, 2003) inspired by the works of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. For an overview of Laclaus work see Torfing
(1999). For a representative sample of the Essex School work see Howarth et al. (2000).
2 PSDT concepts of identity and identification are drawn from psyschoanalytical theory. For a full discussion of the relations
between politics, discourse and psychoanalysis see Stavrakakis (1999).

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