Preserving Power: How Incumbents Use Ideational Strategies to Block Reforms

Over the past three decades, the traditionally closed policy community of agricultural decision-making has faced increasing external pressures to become more inclusive due to external crises, politicization strategies and changes in decision-making procedures. In the European context, new actors, ideas and interests have entered the debate on the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), criticizing existing measures and calling for a more sustainability-centered policy. Despite these efforts, new actors have struggled to challenge the dominant power of farmers' organizations and institutions, achieving only a limited degree of change in the CAP policy instruments and institutional setting. The enduring influence of exceptionalist power structures, coupled with the strategic use of legitimizing discourses, offers a partial explanation for the limited integration of new perspectives into the policy process. However, the mechanisms through which incumbent actors deflect criticism and sustain their privileged positions remain a compelling puzzle. This contribution seeks to understand how farmers' interest groups maintain their dominant position within the decision-making process. In particular, the study focuses on how incumbent actors employ ideational power to respond to external pressures and block reform attempts. The discursive institutionalist perspective offers a valuable framework for understanding how farmers' organizations exercise their agency to navigate and reinforce structural dynamics, thus maintaining control over the policy process. The study employs a longitudinal Discourse Network Analysis to examine the use of narratives and discourses in the latest CAP reform process (2017-2021), using policy documents and interviews as primary sources. By examining the evolution of discourses and actor relationships throughout the policy process, this research finds that core actors, particularly farmers' organizations, leverage their central position within the policy network to advance exceptionalist ideas. They regulate the circulation of ideas by controlling access to policy venues, while using exceptionalist narratives to justify and reinforce their dominance. This strategy allows them to filter out radical proposals and incorporate new ideas only when framed within the exceptionalist paradigm. The analysis demonstrates that narrative strategies significantly shape power structures, with alignment to the exceptionalist paradigm proving critical for maintaining centrality in the policy network during the CAP reform process. Incumbent actors actively resist pressures for change by reinforcing their institutional power, using exceptionalist ideas to reframe policy issues and block reform attempts. This study contributes to understanding the mechanisms behind policy endurance, showing how policy actors exercise agency through ideational power to reinforce their dominant position. As a result, only marginal reforms are allowed, while the core of the policy remains largely unchanged.