The paper’s analysis is aimed at the concept of discourse network analysis suggested by the British political scientist Philip Leifeld and, most of all, at its essential features that make it possible to evaluate an explanatory potential of such a concept that appears to be a combination of qualitative content-analysis and quantitative network analysis. It is interpreted here a principal importance of defining in this concept of the public political debates as dynamic discourse networks discussing policy problems in their development and of the detailed and creative elaboration of the central notion of«political discourse» emphasizing its dynamic nature as well as a significance of combining in itsmethodology of the actor-oriented and the content-oriented approaches to the research over policy discourses that let conceptualizing and measuring co-evolution of actors and their contents in the process of dynamic changes of formulation, reformation and shift of the policies thus having provided an option of their long-term monitoring.