Daniel Béland

Ideas, institutions, and policy change

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 perceive their interests and the environment in which they mobilize. Yet, such processes are not the only catalyst of policy change, and institutional constraints impact the politics of ideas and 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 processes, which interact with such institutions and repertoires.

The social exclusion discourse: ideas and policy change

This article explores the political discourse of social exclusion and its potential impact on social policy. The analysis suggests that in France, Britain, and the European Union at large, the growing political focus on social exclusion has helped to shift policy attention away from other forms of inequality, including income inequality. This logic and the reforms enacted in the name of social inclusion are compatible with moderate forms of economic liberalism distinct from Thatcherite neoliberalism. Theoretically, the article draws on the social science literature on the role of ideas to stress the possible consequences of the social exclusion discourse. Francais Cet article etudie le discours politique de l’exclusion sociale et son impact potentiel sur la protection sociale. L’analyse suggere qu’en France, en Grande Bretagne et dans l’Union europeenne en general, l’accent politique grandissant sur l’exclusion sociale a contribue a eloigner l’attention politique d’autres formes d’inegalite, y compris les inegalites de revenus. Cette logique et les reformes adoptees au nom de l’exclusion sociale sont compatibles avec des formes de liberalisme economique differentes du neoliberalisme thatcherien. Theoriquement, l’article s’appuie sur les travaux de science sociale traitant du role des idees pour mettre l’accent sur les consequences possibles du discours sur l’exclusion sociale.

THE POLITICS OF TERRITORIAL SOLIDARITY Nationalism and Social Policy Reform in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Belgium

Despite the recent proliferation of literature on nationalism and on social policy, little has been written to explore the possible interaction between the two. This article explores two essential aspects of the relationship between substate nationalism and welfare-state development in Canada (Québec), the United Kingdom (Scotland), and Belgium (Flanders). First, the article shows how the processes of identity formation/consolidation and territorial mobilization inherent to substate nationalism often involve a social policy dimension. Second, it analyzes the ways in which substate nationalism has affected welfare-state development in recent decades. Substate nationalism can impact social policy making in at least two ways: by reshaping the policy agenda at both the state and the substate levels and by reinforcing regional policy autonomy, which is depicted as an alternative to centralist schemes. To explain significant variations between the three empirical cases, the article underlines specific institutional, ideological, and socioeconomic factors.

Reconsidering Policy Feedback How Policies Affect Politics

Drawing on examples from the history and politics of Social Security in the United States, this article assesses early and more recent contributions to the policy feedback literature to clarify the meaning of this concept before sketching a new research agenda on policy feedback. As argued, three new streams of policy feedback scholarship have emerged since the late 1990s. Because these new research streams have seldom been discussed together, this article makes a direct contribution to the ongoing social science debate about the nature and the role of policy feedback in advanced industrial societies.

Policy Change and Health Care Research

Explaining policy change is one of the most central tasks of contemporary policy analysis. Reacting to overly rigid institutionalist frameworks that emphasize stability rather than change, a growing number of scholars have formulated new theoretical models to shed light on policy change. Focusing on health care reform but drawing on the broader social science literature on policy and politics, this article offers critical perspectives on the institutionalist and ideational literatures on policy change while assessing their relevance for analyzing change in contemporary health care systems. The last section sketches a research agenda for studying policy change in health care.

Reforming the French welfare state: Solidarity, social exclusion and the three crises of citizenship

The article explores recent debates about citizenship and social provision in France. It examines the essential concepts comparable to ‘social citizenship’, as understood in British debates, and the role that they have played in the development of the French welfare state. Its conclusions are threefold. First, social provision in France is founded on the principle of solidarité, which holds that all citizens face a series of social risks (unemployment and illness) that make them dependent on one another. Second, as the traditional insurance principle (the core of the French welfare state) is founded on socio‐economic conditions (concerning the nature of social interdependence and social risk) that no longer exist, the emergence of these social ills has led to not one but three crises of citizenship: a crisis of coverage, of legitimacy and of participation. Third, while it is too early to draw definitive conclusions, recent policy reforms suggest that the difficulties faced by French welfare are encouraging moves towards the British model of tax‐based (rather than insurance‐based) financing of social provision.

Does Labor Matter? Institutions, Labor Unions and Pension Reform in France and the United States

This article challenges Paul Pierson’s account on the (supposedly declining) role of labor unions in the ‘new politics of the welfare state’. More specifically, the text compares labor’s influence on the French and the American politics of pension reform since the 1980s. The analysis of recent reforms undertaken in both countries demonstrates the impact of institutions and managerial settings on labor’s political strategies. These institutional variables explain the fact that French unions have a much more direct influence on public pension reform than their American counterparts. In France, labor unions have an ideological ‘veto point’ derived from their integration into the management process. Their strong influence on the ‘new politics of the welfare state’ is undeniable: labor still matters.

The Idea of Power and the Role of Ideas

Since the mid-1970s, the social science debate over the meaning of the idea of power has intensified. Offering a critical discussion of the work of Steven Lukes, this brief article puts forward an amended definition of political power before exploring the relationship between ideas, interests and power relations. Drawing on the recent social science literature on the role of ideas in politics, the article suggests that, among other things, ideational processes help actors make sense of their perceived interests. As argued, this recognition of the power of ideas sheds new light on the idea of political power. Finally, following Craig Parsons, the article discusses the relationship between four types of explanatory factor in political analysis: structural, institutional, ideational and psychological.

Space and Protest Policing at International Summits

Since the 1970s a growing body of literature has taken a ‘geographic turn’ and sought to incorporate the study of spatial factors into the social sciences. Building on this theoretical literature, this study undertakes a spatial analysis of the contentious politics that have become so closely and regularly linked to international summit diplomacy. The paper examines and compares the protests surrounding two international summits held in Canada: the Vancouver Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit (1997) and the Kananaskis G8 summit (2002). These two cases serve to demonstrate many of the important ways in which space is controlled and contested by both protesters and state actors such as the police.

A Long Financial March: Pension Reform in China

In the context of rapid economic and demographic change, the People’s Republic of China has attempted to reshape its public pension system. Although China’s current pension system has drawn the attention of many policy analysts, no theoretically informed account on the politics of Chinese pension reform has yet been published. Grounded in a broad institutionalist perspective, this contribution analyses contemporary pension politics in China through the interplay of four main factors: (1) decentralisation and limited administrative capacity, which make it difficult to rationalise and transform the existing pension system; (2) feedback effects from previously enacted pension schemes that further complicate policy change; (3) liberalisation and economic reforms, which have created ‘vested interests’ in the newly established private sector, but which have lacked the strength to generate a mature financial system; (4) finally, the apparent dominance of the neo-liberal financial paradigm commonly associated with the World Bank. While this financial paradigm favours the adoption of new reform proposals, the economic and institutional factors mentioned above complicate their implementation.