Discursive Agency: (Re-)Conceptualizing Actors and Practices in the Analysis of Discursive Policymaking

Interpretive discourse analysis commonly claims to address the interrelation between actors and discourses. However, the analytical focus of most approaches is on structures (discourses) while much less attention is paid to agency. This paper explicitly addresses discursive agency in two steps. First, we systematically review theoretical and analytical dimensions of agency in existing interpretive discourse analysis approaches. This review reveals a set of shared assumptions; most notably a concept of “trialectic” agency emphasizing the constitution of agency among the individual, the (discursive) structures, and the researcher's interpretation. Second, we propose an analytical heuristic, the Discursive Agency Approach, which is developed on the basis of the review and own empirical data. The proposed approach consists of four elements: (1) policy discourses, (2) political institutions, (3) agents defined via a set of characteristics, and (4) strategic practices. This approach is meant to facilitate a systematic exploration of agency under a discourse perspective, tackling the question of how a policy is constituted through the agency ascribed to its proponents in dynamic discursive processes, and how actors acquire political relevance through discursive means. To enable this goal, we propose distinct research steps and associated methods that link the approach to existing means of analysis.