The role of rhetoric and affect in policy changes: the case of Dutch life course policy

Abstract

Using methods that are developed in discourse historical analysis, this case study on Dutch life course policy suggests that analysis of (the interrelationship between) rhetoric and affect can contribute to a poststructuralist explanation of policy change. It is argued that the catachretic act of naming this policy ‘life course policy’ produced new spaces of representation within which (partly) incompatible goals and values were united. Actors identified with these new signifiers because they contained a promise, a way out of the old, dead-end discursive positions. Thus, the use of rhetoric constituted the dominant social security discourse in a new way, containing both the former dominant discourse and the voices of resistance, as a result of which the emphasis in the Dutch social security discourse shifted, albeit temporarily, from a policy informed by the values of the market to a work–life balance policy.