Exzerpieren und Literature Review

Lernziele für diese Einheit

Notizen und Hervorhebungen

Beispiel eines Exzperts

Exzerpte

Struktur von Exzerpten

nach Turabian (2007, p. 40)

Beispiel eines Exzerpts

Abbildung 2: Beispiel eines Exzerpts des Textes von Eder, Libiseller, und Schneider (2021)

Literature Review

Aufbau eines Literature Reviews

Beispiel eines Literature Review

Eder (2023, pp. 517-519)

DNA originated in the late 2000s with the works of Schneider, Janning, Leifeld, and Malang, who investigated the role of political networks in public policy (Janning et al. 2009). The overall goal of this research programme was to evaluate the benefits of social network analysis for the study of political processes, especially in the realm of public policy, and to determine its applicability to this policy field. Philip Leifeld then advanced and formalized the approach in his PhD thesis on German pension politics (Leifeld 2016, 2013), laying the foundations for DNA’s development into a promising tool for grasping the content and dynamics of policy debates.

Ever since, scholars have applied DNA in a variety of cases and have thereby contributed to a vivid research community and the emergence of four interdependent streams of research. Studies in the first stream apply DNA to cases from the field of public policy, and they further develop and refine the approach. The DNA provides the framework for analysing public policies in different geographical regions and diverse political systems, such as energy policies (Rinscheid 2015), software patents, and property rights in Europe (Leifeld and Haunss 2012), agricultural policies in Brazil (Ghinoi, Wesz Junior, and Piras 2018), or health policies in the UK (Buckton et al. 2019; Hilton et al. 2020). All these studies underline the usefulness of the approach for both displaying the content of a policy debate and visualizing the attempt of policy actors to influence the policy process in their favour by building coalitions of like-minded.

In contrast to these contributions, studies in the second stream seek to methodologically advance DNA. On the one hand, they move forward from sole description to inference (Leifeld 2018). The goal of these contributions is to identify “the generative mechanisms behind policy debates” (Leifeld 2020, 181), and to uncover the structural causes of continuity and change in such debates (see also van Meegdenburg in this volume). On the other hand, these studies move beyond the qualitative analysis of political claims and apply natural language processing, such as machine learning, for a supervised classification of statements (Haunss et al. 2020; Lapesa et al. 2020).

A steadily increasing number of studies in the third stream apply DNA to policies that are transnational in character. These studies bridge the divide between domestic public policies and the international arena. Most of these studies investigate the dynamics of political debates in the field of climate change and the regulation of carbon dioxide in the United States (Fisher, Leifeld, and Iwaki 2013; Fisher, Waggle, and Leifeld 2013; Kukkonen, Ylä-Anttila, and Broadbent 2017; Fisher and Leifeld 2019) or Italy (Ghinoi and Steiner 2020). Others investigate international financial politics (Haunss 2017) or migration (Wallaschek 2020). The contributions in this stream have demonstrated how to successfully integrate actors from different levels of analysis into a single and coherent framework for analysing political processes. Furthermore, they have underlined that policy debates are increasingly becoming transnational and pluricentric, with a variety of actors seeking to participate.

The fourth and final stream is the most recent one and seeks to apply DNA to the realm of foreign and security policy. Eder (2019) refers to DNA for analysing instances of group decision-making in the Bush cabinet in course of the run-up to the Iraq War of 2003. He applies the approach to public speeches and interviews of key decision-makers. Instead of indirectly inferring hasty concurrence-seeking from the presence of antecedent conditions or from final symptoms of groupthink, he is able to visualize non-public decision-making in group settings. Thereby, he unveils concurrence-seeking mechanisms and contributes to the methodological advancement of groupthink (see also Barr and Mintz in this volume). Troy (2019) also refers to DNA, displaying 80 years of papal human rights discourse against the backdrop of global developments. He determines the central figure in this discourse (i.e., Pope John Paul II) and characterizes Pope Francis I as a crucial transformer of the debate. The influence of different feminist perspectives on Canada’s foreign policy is in the focus of interest in the study of Morton, Muchiri, and Swiss (2020). They seek to understand how and which feminist perspectives impact Canadian foreign policy and its implementation in various fields.

Finally, Eder, Libiseller, and Schneider (2021) discuss how domestic politics, especially government-opposition dynamics and the perception of political opportunities, determine a country’s foreign and security policy in the case of counter-terrorism. Applying DNA, they conclude that this policy field “is highly politicised and contested and resembles any other ‘normal’ policy field in democratic societies” (Eder, Libiseller, and Schneider 2021, 172).

This last and most recent stream of research has demonstrated the potential of applying DNA to the study of foreign and security policy. On the following pages, I will outline the basic foundations of the approach and elaborate why scholars should consider this method more seriously when investigating the foreign policy decision-making of states. As I will demonstrate, DNA allows scholars to investigate the content and the dynamics of a debate, and display the actors and coalitions as the carriers of these political debates that either cause foreign policy to change or to remain in the status quo.