How exceptionalism endures: incumbents’ ideational power and narrative strategies in the Common Agricultural Policy

Despite growing pressures for reform, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) exhibits strong policy endurance. As core incumbents in EU agricultural policy-making, farmers’ organisations have successfully neutralised criticism and sustained dominance of exceptionalist ideas. This article analyses how farmers’ interest groups, as incumbent actors, exercise ideational power to resist challenges in CAP’s policy-making. Combining a discursive institutionalist lens with the Narrative Policy Framework, it shows how incumbents deploy power through ideas by engaging in narrative strategies aimed at preserving the CAP ideational core. Focusing on the 2017–2021 reform process and using Discourse Network Analysis, the article reveals that farmers’ organisations strategically combine exceptionalist narratives with selective co-optation of alternative ideas to legitimise the policy core while responding to criticisms. In doing so, they actively contribute to the CAP endurance by adapting the ideational core without transforming it. By demonstrating how incumbents sustain and adapt dominant ideas though narrative strategies, this article advances discursive institutionalism by offering an operationalisation of ideational power in empirical policy analysis.