Abstract
This chapter develops a research framework for the study of hegemony struggles with a specific research interest in questions of strategy. It focuses first on the instruments that cultural political economy (CPE) envisages for empirical analyses of hegemony production. Second, it suggests enhancing the analytical strength of CPE empirical investigations of the making and challenging of hegemony by integrating it with a historical materialist policy analysis (HMPA). Third, it argues for merging CPE, HMPA and critical discourse analysis of practical argumentation to improve the analytical strength of CPE/HMPA when investigating strategies in the more overarching domain of struggles over hegemony. Building on this, the chapter turns to the concrete operationalization of the suggested research framework in the following study of the Italian case.
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Notes
- 1.
Concerning interpretive policy analysis, see Brand (2013, p. 429): ‘In the context of the critique of the rationalist and positivist assumptions of policy analysis and the dichotomy of knowledge and policy, a broad current in policy analysis has been developing since the 1990s which focuses more on discourse and meaning, language, and argumentation and rhetoric as essential for the policy process and, therefore, too, for policy analysis. […] Describing this kind of policy analysis as “interpretive” […] is the lowest common denominator’.
- 2.
- 3.
The original timespan of observation reaches from Monti’s appointment as Prime Minister (16 November 2011) up to his resignation (21 December 2012). For practical reasons, the collection of the primary sources has been extended to the end of 2012. Moreover, in few exceptional cases, also sources precedent or subsequent to this timespan have been integrated into the corpus, as marked in the online Appendix (http://extras.springer.com/).
- 4.
Given the dimensions of the corpus amounting to about 1000 sources (see online Appendix), the collected primary sources have been analysed by using the software MAXQDA, which, among others, allows to digitally ‘code’ the data on the basis of personalized code-systems.
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Caterina, D. (2019). Investigating Hegemony Struggles: A Transdisciplinary Research Framework in Three Steps. In: Struggles for Hegemony in Italy’s Crisis Management. Contributions to Political Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95615-2_3
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