How do policy debates work? How can interest groups and legislators influence political processes through the media? This book introduces discourse network analysis as a methodological toolbox for the study of policy debates. With this set of methods, political discourse is cast as a temporal network of actors and their statements in the media over time. In a case study, Philip Leifeld applies discourse network analysis to the policy debate on old-age security in Germany. Demonstrating that German pension politics was characterized by an increasing polarization of competing coalitions towards the end of the 1990s, Leifeld shows how structural breaks in the discourse network can explain major policy changes and a radical turn to privatization in 2001.

Policy Debates on Reprogenetics takes an in-depth look at recent public policy debates over stem cell research and therapeutic cloning in Great Britain and Germany in order to determine the effect of such debates on the progress of scientific knowledge. Svea Luise Herrmann argues that debates about government policy do not tend to lead to more societal and political control over scientific research; rather, the discussions, when framed as questions of ethics, allow societies to air anxieties without retarding or challenging scientific progress. As our understanding of genetics continues to grow, this volume will be a useful resource for scientists and policy makers alike.