Discourse in Comparative Policy Analysis: Privatisation Policies in Britain, Russia and the United States

Privatisation has been of the most widely used and extensively debated policies in the world for the last quarter century. This phenomenon, though, is mostly unified by rhetoric, and substantially varies across time and space, particularly in implementation. To answer the question of what presupposes a choice of particular mechanism of privatisation, three distinct cases of privatisation (the US, the UK, and Russia) are analysed through Fischer's (1995) model of practical policy deliberation. The model tests the reasons for policy ranging from its technical efficiency to its relation to the ideological principles that justify the societal system. The elaborated theory suggests that privatisation policies generally pursue multiple goals, with the prevailing goal being determined by the dominant discourse in which the topic of privatisation is debated in society. The prevailing goal, in turn, determines the privatisation mechanism that maximises this particular goal.