Discourse Coalition Analysis

A story-line is a condensed, suggestive narrative or metaphor that compresses a complex web of scientific, moral, and political claims into a graspable phrase, such as 'pollution prevention pays' or 'acid rain kills forests.' It is central because it does the binding work of a discourse coalition: precisely because a story-line is a little ambiguous, actors who disagree on specifics can each invoke it and thereby align, often without coordinating. Story-lines also reduce the discursive complexity of an issue, fixing a particular framing of the problem. Tracking which story-lines circulate, who uses them, and what they obscure is the core analytic task, since they are the vehicles through which discourses spread and coalitions cohere.

Hajer offers two criteria, and both must be met. The first is 'structuration': the discourse has come to structure how actors think and talk about the issue, so that even opponents have to use its concepts and story-lines to be taken seriously. The second is 'institutionalization': the discourse has solidified into concrete institutional arrangements — laws, agencies, procedures, standards, routine practices. A discourse that dominates the talk but never reshapes institutions, or that is written into rules but ignored in everyday argument, is not fully hegemonic. Genuine dominance requires both, which is how the method separates mere rhetorical fashion from a discourse that has truly captured a policy field.

The Advocacy Coalition Framework groups actors by shared beliefs and coordinated action in pursuit of policy goals, emphasizing relatively stable belief systems and strategic cooperation. Hajer's discourse coalitions are looser and more linguistic: actors are bound by shared story-lines rather than by shared interests, common beliefs, or any deliberate coordination, and may align unwittingly through using the same narratives. The focus shifts from interests and strategy to the productive power of language in defining problems. Discourse coalition analysis thus asks how meaning organizes politics, and can reveal alignments across conventional interest lines that interest-based or advocacy-coalition accounts would not predict.