Ideas, institutions, and policy change
By: BÉLAND, Daniel
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ArticlePublisher: Oxfordshire : Routledge, August 2009Journal of European Public Policy 16, 5, p. 701-718Abstract: Seeking to amend historical institutionalism, this article draws on the political science literature on ideas and the sociological literature on framing to discuss three ways in which ideational processes impact policy change. First, such processes help to construct the problems and issues that enter the policy agenda. Second, ideational processes shape the assumptions that affect the content of reform proposals. Third, these processes can become discursive weapons that participate in the construction of reform imperatives. Overall, ideational processes impact the ways policy actors perceived their interests and the environmental in which they mobilize. Yet, such processes are not the only catalyst of policy change. This claim is further articulated in the final section, which shows how national institutions and repertoires remain central to the politics of policy change despite the undeniable role of transnational actors and process, which interact with such institutions and repertoires.
Seeking to amend historical institutionalism, this article draws on the political science literature on ideas and the sociological literature on framing to discuss three ways in which ideational processes impact policy change. First, such processes help to construct the problems and issues that enter the policy agenda. Second, ideational processes shape the assumptions that affect the content of reform proposals. Third, these processes can become discursive weapons that participate in the construction of reform imperatives. Overall, ideational processes impact the ways policy actors perceived their interests and the environmental in which they mobilize. Yet, such processes are not the only catalyst of policy change. This claim is further articulated in the final section, which shows how national institutions and repertoires remain central to the politics of policy change despite the undeniable role of transnational actors and process, which interact with such institutions and repertoires.
discourse; ideas; institutions; interests; policy; politics
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