Could policymaking be constitutive of politics? Conventionally, policymaking is conceived of as the result of politics. In this view classical-modernist political institutions seek to involve people in politics via a choice of elected officials who are subsequently supposed to represent the interests of their voters, initiate policy and oversee its implementation. But what if people do not always have clear-cut identities or preferences? What if they regard ‘party politics’ with a certain cynicism, and are much more ‘spectators’ than participants (cf. Manin 1997)? Is that the end of politics? This chapter argues that this is not necessarily true. Citizens could also be seen as political activists on ‘stand by’ who often need to be ignited in order to become politically involved. This creates a new role for policymaking. In many cases it is a public policy initiative that triggers people to reflect on what they really value, and that motivates them to voice their concerns or wishes and become politically active themselves. Public policy, in other words, often creates a public domain, as a space in which people of various origins deliberate on their future as well as on their mutual interrelationships and their relationship to the government.

The idea of a network society only adds to this. Nowadays policymaking often takes place in a context where fixed political identities and stable communities always be assumed.

In the early 1980s critical policy analysts began to aim their arrows at one of the key claims of positivist, technocratic policy science: its alleged neutral stance towards the politically charged issues that were the subject of its investigations and analyses. In fact, from its onset as an institutionalized discipline, the strict separation of knowledge and politics has been the raison d'être of traditional policy analysis. Through the application of neutral, scientific methods policy analysts would be able to generate objective knowledge that suggested optimal solutions to a broad range of social and economic problems. By systematically collecting and analysing the ‘facts of the matter’, traditional policy analysis claimed to be the voice of rationality, even the final cognitive arbiter, in a contested political world.

A number of critical scholars, such as Douglas Torgerson, Frank Fischer and Douglas Amy argued convincingly that this foundationalist self-image of positivist policy analysis was profoundly misguided. The neutral methods of scientific policy analysis itself presupposed strong assumptions about the constitution of society. These scholars asserted that the methodology and epistemology of positivist policy analysis tacitly assumed – and required – a certain hierarchical societal ordering. A ‘scientistic’, quantitative policy analysis was itself part of a particular institutional order in which political and economic elites, effectively insulated from the citizens' voice, sought to design economically efficient and technologically efficacious solutions to what they perceived as society's problems.

Governance or the rise of a new vocabulary

One of the most striking developments in the analysis of politics and policy-making is the shift in vocabulary that has occurred over the last ten years. Terms such as ‘governance’, ‘institutional capacity’, ‘networks’, ‘complexity’, ‘trust’, ‘deliberation’ and ‘interdependence’ dominate the debate, while terms such as ‘the state’, ‘government’, ‘power’ and ‘authority’, ‘loyalty’, ‘sovereignty’, ‘participation’ and ‘interest groups’ have lost their grip on the analytical imagination. The new vocabulary prevails in spheres ranging from international relations (Finkelstein 1995; Rosenau 1995; World Bank 1997) to policy analysis and public administration (Rhodes 1996; 2000), from comparative politics to urban planning (Forester 1999; Healey 1997; Innes and Booher 1999b), from European studies (Marks et al. 1996) to political theory (Dryzek 2000; March and Olsen 1995). The shift from ‘government’ to ‘governance’ is widely proclaimed and endorsed in the political-science and policy-xscience communities (for an analytical overview, see especially Pierre 2000). Social science is no less immune to fads than popular culture. New concepts often have a remarkably short shelf-life. New vocabularies may signify no more than a change of rhetoric. In this case, such an explanation is too simple. The new vocabulary seems to capture changes in both the nature and topography of politics. A new range of political practices has emerged between institutional layers of the state and between state institutions and societal organizations. The new language is rooted in an appreciation of the importance of these new political practices.