European Policy Analysis Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2016 | Page 123

European Policy Analysis

“messy”—that is, the failure of practice to
conform to the model is a weakness in the
practice, not in the model.

Fourth, there is the question of
the extent to which the term embodies
normative approval. For example,
historical etymology for the Netherlands
(Van de Graaf and Hoppe 1989, 15–18)
shows that “policy” emerged and gained
popularity in political discourse because
in everyday parlance it was endowed with
all desirable qualities that set it apart from
the negative connotations of “politics” and
“politicking”. Hence, scholarly definitions
of “policy” frequently intimate qualities
like guidance and direction, leadership,
coherence, conscious and conscientious
deliberation, if not sagacity, wisdom;
and order, transparency, strategic focus,
and instrumentality in solving public
problems.

Now, policy scholars have some
good excuses to eschew all too precise
definitions of key concepts like “policy”
and “policymaking”. The world of policy
and policymaking hardly lends itself to
controlled experimentation and theory
testing. Although some scholars would
adhere to the Popperian standard that
a “theory” should be precise enough
to be proven wrong, the field of policy
process “theories” falls inevitably short
of this standard. The vastly differentiated
field is beset by ever newly emerging
key concepts, differently interpreted and
differently connected in new “theories”
or “frameworks of analysis”, and studied
by very different research methods: from
ethnography and history or process
tracing of single cases, to standard large-N
methods to discover correlations or
causal mechanisms between “variables”,
small-N comparative studies using
fuzzy set logic, and many, many more.

We fully agree with Sabatier who in
Theories of the Policy Process (1999; 2007)
stresses the “staggering complexity of the
policy process” and discusses “theories”
essentially as simplifications to make
sense of them.

This article is therefore addressed
to some particular problems in the
theorizing of governing. It examines the
place of “policy” in the giving of accounts
of governing, and the ways in which
different perspectives characterize the
nature of “policy”, and argues that these
accounts are part of the reality that they
describe—that is, they are performative
as well as representational.

Representation and Performation

I

n Dvora Yanow’s study of an Israeli
community corporation, How Does
a Policy Mean, she notes that at the
public annual meeting of the corporation,
the executive director would ask, “What
are our goals and objectives?” She asks
why this should be necessary, given the
extent to which this is addressed in other
settings, but goes on to point out that the
corporation was in fact expanding its
activities, and asking this question gave
scope for the goals to be defined in a way
which encompassed the activities being
undertaken, and in doing so, justified
the corporation’s image as a modern,
rational, goal-seeking organization. That
is to say, the statement was not so much
representing the goals as performing
them (Yanow 1996, 199–202). In the
representative idiom, scholars manage
to project their inductively and/or
deductively produced models onto
the world, and warrant them as more
or less “true”, that is, as fairly good

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