Studying Political Ideas: A Public Political Discourse Approach

Abstract

How do parties, groups and movements construct shared frameworks of understanding? Answering this question must involve some analysis of the role played by political ideas. They are an inescapable fact of political life. Yet, as with most inescapable facts, controversy has raged over how they should be studied. 1 This article presents a framework for the empirical analysis of ideas. It aims to strike a balance between the presentation of a set of general assumptions, and a recognition that any framework must engage with particular evidence from the historical context under investigation, especially the processes through which ideational communication occurs. Elements from a variety of perspectives are combined to provide a ‘public political discourse’ approach, which: appreciates the importance of communication through the media; provides justifications for specific sources of evidence to be used; and places ideas in context. My main concern throughout is in developing a useful framework of explicit assumptions about how to study political ideas. It is not my intention to delve deeply into the philosophical roots of its elements, nor do I seek to provide a blueprint that is bought wholesale or not at all. It represents only one approach among countless possible others. Rather, my aim is to raise awareness of the fact that the assumptions which are brought to the study of political ideas are important determinants of the kinds of analyses we see produced. These assumptions need to be stated and defended, with a recognition that they obscure as many possibilities as they reveal. This essay emerges from a partial sense of dissatisfaction with recent methodological debates in history, a field which has, since the 1980s, experienced a wave of revisionism. The shift has involved a widespread reappraisal of earlier class-based interpretations of politics and a reassertion of the importance of ideas, usually defined as ‘discourses’. The examination of these, and the organizational structures of parties, movements, and the state, has gone hand in hand with a new sensitivity to the means through which historical evidence is mediated, along with the emergence of postmodernist approaches to political identities. Written from the perspective of one who enjoys having a foot in both disciplines ‐ history and political science ‐ this essay is intended to suggest to the political science community the ways in which some of the interesting developments in historiography over the past 15 years, if developed in the directions outlined here, might contribute to an understanding of the relationship between political ideas and political action. Although analysis of how ideas, parties and movements interrelate has always been a core concern of political scientists, it is interesting to note how few of the controversies that have raged in history have flowed into political science’s mainstream. Yet