Vivien Schmidt on Understanding Power Through Ideas and Discourse

In her newest publication, The Power of Ideas and Discourse in Political Analysis: A Discursive Institutionalist Perspective, Professor Vivien Ann Schmidt brings decades of influential scholarship on ideas and discourse into a single, ambitious volume that reframes how political scientists and social scientists understand power, legitimacy, and change. Drawing on work begun in the late 1990s and expanded through years of theoretical innovation, the book examines how ideas, from public philosophies and symbols to narratives and frames, shape political life through discourse. By engaging a wide range of approaches across the social sciences, Schmidt offers readers a comprehensive framework for understanding how persuasion operates in moments of stability, crisis, and transformation, from the rise of neoliberalism to contemporary populist challenges.

What inspired you to bring together decades of work on ideas and discourse into this book now?

I actually had a contract for the book with Oxford University Press since 2011, when all I had intended to do was to present my own work, begun in the late 1990s, which had gone viral with my 2008 article in the Annual Review of Political Science. But I never got around to writing it, even as I continued to innovate in other books and articles by applying my discursive institutionalist perspective on ideas and discourse to neo-liberalism, to ideational and discursive power, and to legitimacy. Once the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020, however, with travel impossible and time on my hands, I decided that this was the moment to begin the book, and to make it more all-encompassing by engaging with the great varieties of ways in which political scientists and social scientists more generally deal with ideas and discourse.

Among the many forms ideas can take, from symbols to public philosophies, which do you see as having the greatest political power today—and why do certain ideas gain influence during periods of political transformation?

It is hard to say that any one form of ideas has more political power than any other, since they are generally used together in the exercise of persuasion, which is at the basis of my approach to ideas and discourse. Take the case of neo-liberalism. As an over-arching public philosophy, it took hold in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and has been ever-resilient through many a crisis until recently. It underpinned UK Prime Minister Thatcher’s integrative narratives about her grocer father, as she invoked memories of Victorian values of thrift and hard work, and US President Reagan’s framing of the market as the solution, the state as the problem, as he used evocative symbols of the welfare queen while promising to cut social benefits. In periods of transformation, when things are in flux, new public philosophies can be even more powerful than the existing ones, as they were in the 1970s, and as they are today. Populist anti-system worldviews challenge existing philosophies, such as neo-liberals’ support for globalization (underlying Trump’s tariffs), British adherence to the EU (leading to Brexit), as well as progressives’ support for addressing climate change. In the last case, the populist frame has sometimes been: they worry about the end of the world; we worry about the end of the month.

How can discourse function as both a democratic force and a source of domination or exclusion?

If ideas are about what we think, discourse is about their articulation. It expresses at the same time ‘what is thought’ (ideas) and ‘who said what to whom’ (agents in discursive interactions) in given contexts, or ‘where, when and how’ political actors coordinate policymaking and communicate with the public. Discourse can involve relatively neutral exchanges as well as persuasion or domination and exclusion. Persuasion is essential in liberal democracies. It is at the basis of the deliberation central to democratic practices and civil discourse—in particular as developed in Jürgen Habermas’ philosophy of ‘communicative action’ and the field of ‘deliberative democracy.’ That said, contestation is also inevitable, whether as argumentation or as developed in Chantal Mouffe’s philosophy of ‘agonistic democracy.’ Both are part of what I see as persuasive power through ideas via discourse. Discourse can instead be a source of domination, however, when it blinds people to others’ viewpoints, as in Michel Foucault’s philosophy, which involves structuring power in ideas and discourse. But discourse can equally be a source of exclusion, as coercive power over ideas and discourse, for example, when the media in an authoritarian regime imposes only one narrative on events to the exclusion of other voices, or neoliberal economic experts intent on austerity policies don’t listen to alternatives.

What does your framework reveal about contemporary challenges such as polarization, populism, and democratic erosion?

In today’s world, ideas and discourse are powerful tools not only for engaging in everyday politics but also for generating polarizing disruption and democratic erosion. We cannot explain the success of populists without acknowledging the persuasive power of charismatic messengers who disseminate their us-versus-them, post-truth messages through the echo chambers of the social media, amplified by the billionaire-owned traditional media, which pick up on the milieu fueling people’s discontents—socio-economic, socio-cultural, and political. These are my four ‘M’s’ of populism.

What advice would you give students researching ideas and discourse across different political contexts?

Students should be open to the many different ways in which ideas and discourse are used to understand the world as well as to maintain or change it. At a time of populist revolts, economic dislocations, global instability, climate upheavals, and wars, we no longer live in a world in which we can safely rely on traditional explanatory methods’ built-in assumptions about individuals’ rationally calculating behavior; expectations based on institutions’ path-dependent rules and regulations; or suppositions grounded in communities’ culturally scripted action. I am not suggesting that we abandon such approaches, just that we recognize that without ideational/discursive approaches alongside these, we cannot explain the dynamics of change, the exercise of power, or the construction of meaning essential to explaining the world.

What do you ultimately hope readers take away from this book?

I hope that the book provides readers—political scientists and social scientists more generally—with greater understanding of the many different ways in which incorporating ideas and discourse in their own analyses can add depth and dynamics to their studies of politics, policy, and polity.

To learn more about Professor Schmidt’s new book, click here.

Vivien Ann Schmidt is a Jean Monnet Professor of European Integration, Professor Emerita of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, and Professor Emerita of Political Science, as well as the Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Europe, all at Boston University where she taught from 1998 to 2023.  An authority on European politics and society, the European Union, and France, she has written several books including Europe’s Crisis of Legitimacy: Governing by Rules and Ruling by Numbers in the Eurozone (2020) which received the Best Book Award of the American Political Science Association’s Ideas, Knowledge, and Politics section. To learn more about her work and accomplishments, visit her faculty profile.

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