282 ANALYZING DATA
An interpretive approach has inspired, for example, narrative explanations of governance
(Bevir, Rhodes, and Weller 2003c). One popular, positivist-informed explanation for the growth
of governance posits that advanced industrial societies develop through a process that involves
functional and institutional specialization and fragmentation (Rhodes 1988). By contrast,
interpretivists might highlight the ways in which patterns of governance vary depending on
inherited traditions.
Interpretivists might distinguish, for example, between an Anglo-Saxon antistate tradition, a
Germanic organic state tradition, a French Jacobin tradition, and a Scandinavian tradition that
mixes the Anglo-Saxon and the Germanic (Dyson 1980; Loughlin and Peters 1997). In the
Germanic tradition, state and civil society are part of an organic whole; the state is rechtsstaat—
a legal state vested with exceptional authority but constrained by its own laws—and civil ser-
vants are personifications of this state, not just public employees. The Anglo-Saxon tradition
draws a clearer boundary between state and civil society; there is no legal basis to the state, and
civil servants have no constitutional position. The Jacobin tradition regards the French state as
the one and indivisible republic, exercising strong central authority to contain the antagonistic
relations between state and civil society. The Scandinavian tradition is also “organic”—charac-
terized by rechtsstaat—but it differs from the Germanic tradition in favoring a decentralized
unitary state with a strong ethic of participation.
Varied traditions inform the content of governance, conceived as proliferating networks, in
different states. The Danish tradition, with its ethic of participation, has confronted governance
as an issue of how to retain democratic control of multiplying networks. In the Germanic tradi-
tion, the legal framework sets the boundaries of, and also guides, official action, so the direct
imposition of control is seen as unnecessary, and there is consequently a comparatively high
degree of tolerance for the multilevel networks—politikverflechtung—so common in federal
systems. The Jacobin tradition with its assumption of conflict between state and civil society
suggests that networks are a potential threat to state authority unless they are subject to state
control through, for example, strong mayoral leadership.
State traditions operate at a high level of abstraction. Hence, interpretivists also decenter
these traditions to show how forms of governance arise as products of actions that embody the
multiple beliefs legislators, bureaucrats, and others have come to adopt through a process of
modifying diverse traditions to meet specific dilemmas. In Britain, liberal conservatives pro-
moted markets to deal with the dilemmas they associated with the corporate state, including
state overload and the capture of policy networks by vested interests. Later, social democrats
actively promoted networks, or joined-up governance, as a response to a dilemma of integra-
tion they believed had been exasperated by marketization. Perri 6, a key adviser to New Labour,
argued that governments confront “wicked problems” that do not fit with functional govern-
ment based on central departments and their policy networks (Perri 6, 1997). He advocated
holistic governance to span departmental cages, with holistic budgets, cross-functional out-
come measures, and integrated information systems. British governance arose as a result of
successive waves of public sector reform, each of which was informed by a different tradition
reacting to different dilemmas (Bevir and Rhodes 2003).
We can explain the practice of governance in different states by means of narratives that
unpack them by reference to beliefs that arose against the background of distinct traditions. On
what concepts does narrative rely? What makes it a valid form of explanation for human ac-
tions and practices? What grammatical structure defines narrative explanations such as those of
our two epigraphs?