Political modernisation

The concept of 'political modernisation' is one of the key notions in the policy arrangements approach. It tries to capture those structural transformations in political domains in contemporary societies, which have or may have consequences for day-to-day policy practices. In turn, developments within certain policy practices may contribute to or contradict these structural transformations. Europeanisation offers an obvious example: while one can regard Europeanisation as a structural transformation process, one witnesses the mobilisation of EU rules and funds by policy actors at the local level, in order to achieve certain policy goals, thereby indirectly contributing to the Europeanisation of domestic policy practices. It is this two-way process or duality between structural transformations on the one hand and policy practices on the other which we deal with in this chapter. The central questions are: How can we understand the concept of political modernisation? How do processes of political modernisation affect policy practices and vice versa? How can we understand and explain processes, events and outcomes within policy arrangements? And how should we study the interplay of structural processes of political modernisation and day-to-day policy-making in empirical research? The concept of 'political modernisation' has been interpreted quite differently. Some use it normatively and 'locally', as a programme to reform given political and democratic institutions. Others link the concept directly to the governance debate, transcending this normative and local focus. Again others consider 'political modernisation' as a purely analytical concept to understand structural transformations in relation to day-to-day political practices (and vice versa). In this chapter we elaborate upon the second and third perspectives. Characteristic for an analytical perspective on political modernisation is, firstly, to link policy analysis to sociological and political science theories on modernity and modernisation. We especially relate to the debate on second modernity and reflexive modernisation. This literature offers fruitful insights into the structural transformations of current societies, implying various consequences for politics, policy-making and governance. Also the reverse relationship, from policy practices to structural transformations, is theorised about in this literature. In this sense political modernisation is not a normative programme, but an analytical tool to understand change and stability of policy in a rapidly changing world. Secondly, (political) modernisation is not a simple, diachronic and evolutionary process, for example from 'tradition' to 'early modernity' and to 'late modernity' (A. B. C). Although we acknowledge a certain path of development in time and space, this path is in our view complex, synchronic and (largely) unplanned. This includes the juxtaposition of traditional and modern structures and their merging into hybrid ones, as well as multi-facetted loops and feedbacks, such as the 'modernisation of tradition' and the 'traditionalisation of modernity' running parallel. Also, structures differ in time and space, so that we prefer to speak in the plural, of traditions and modernities. The format of this chapter is as follows. The next section starts with the discussion about the 'duality of structure' literature to grasp the mutual relationships between political modernisation and policy agents embedded in policy arrangements at the theoretical level. With that, we distance ourselves from simple mechanical causal models, in which for example structure is assumed to determine processes and outcomes of interaction. Instead, duality implies a subtle, two-way, multi-consequential model, in which structural processes in and structural properties of social systems constrain and enable meaningful action, while agents (re)produce and transform these processes and properties through their meaningful conduct at the same time. Yet they do so indirectly (through long social chains, hence together with 'unknown others'), mostly unintended (e.g. local agents do not generally intend to strengthen a process such as Europeanisation) and only in the longer run (since systems and structures generally do not change that easily). Subsequently, we deal with the concept of political modernisation. Its background, definition(s) and theoretical grounding will be clarified. After discussing modernisation and modernity we deal with the changing relations between state, civil society and market, and with patterns and structures of governance in the first and second phase of political modernisation. In the following sections, we pay attention to methodological matters. We will introduce two analytical perspectives, labelled institutional and strategic analysis respectively, to deal with political modernisation and the duality of structure in empirical research. The institutional analysis refers to analysing certain practices from a structural perspective, while 'putting the conduct of agencies between brackets' (Giddens). This implies a focus on structural transformations-understood as political modernisation as well as on the structural proper ties properties of policy arrangements rules, discourses and resources structures. In contrast, strategic analysis starts the analysis with the actions, ideas, power, etc., of agencies, while putting between brackets the structures in the context of which these actors have to operate. We will illustrate the application of these analytical distinguishable approaches by applying them to the case of Dutch organic farming. This case has no other meaning than to illustrate our theoretical claims and our methodological tools. This case reappears in the next chapters, While this chapter analyses the case mainly from an institutional perspective, the next chapter will unfold a strategic analysis thereof (Liefferink, this volume), while the subsequent chapter will take it as an example of our policy evaluation efforts (Arts and Goverde, this volume). With that, we can display the coherence between consequent perspectives and ways of application and operationalisation of the policy arrangement approach.