Recent decades have witnessed an discursive turn in political science was well as a surge of new theoretical ideas on the nature and evolution of ideas and discourses, and how these may influence policy and politics. Empirically, scholars in this field use a variety of methods like qualitative or narrative analysis or word count techniques. This paper will introduce an new method to the field: Cognitive Mapping. Cognitive mapping enables scholars to reveal and analyse discourses by transferring the ideas imbedded in communication visual graphs. The method’s inductive and structural character makes it suitable for any issue-area. Moreover the technique plays no epistemological favourites: It may be used to provide detailed idiosyncratic narratives of public discourses and actors’ ideas as well as structured quantitative representations thereof. The paper will illustrate the value of the technique by analysing the case of the Euro crisis and the Franco-German discursive relations therein.
