Martin B. Carstensen

Paradigm man vs. the bricoleur: bricolage as an alternative vision of agency in ideational change

The status of ideational explanations in political science has been strengthened by the argument that institutionalized ideas structure actors’ identification of their interests as well as the interests of their political adversaries. Despite its utility, the focus on the institutionalization of ideas has had the unfortunate consequence that actors are often, implicitly or explicitly, believed to internalize ideas, making it difficult to understand how actors are able to change their ideas and institutions. Drawing on cultural sociology and ideational theory, the paper introduces the ‘bricoleur’ as an alternative vision of agency. It is argued, first, that actors cannot cognitively internalize highly structured symbolic systems, and ideas are thus ‘outside the minds of actors’. Second, using the cognitive schemas at their disposal, actors construct strategies of action based on pre-constructed ideational and political institutions. Third, actors must work actively and creatively with the ideas and institutions they use, because the structure within which actors work does not determine their response to new circumstances. Fourth, as a vast number of ideational studies have shown, actors face a complex array of challenges in getting their ideas to the top of the policy agenda, which makes it all the more important to act pragmatically, putting ideas together that may not be logically compatible but rather answer political and cultural logics. In sum, agency often takes the form of bricolage, where bits and pieces of the existing ideational and institutional legacy are put together in new forms leading to significant political transformation.

Ideas are Not as Stable as Political Scientists Want Them to Be: A Theory of Incremental Ideational Change

Most theories about ideas in politics implicitly conceptualise ideas as relatively stable entities that act as a catalyst for political change in times of crisis. In these theories political change is usually brought on by the full and sudden replacement of old ideas with new ones. This articles main charge against the mainstream view of ideas is that it is based on a simplified conception of ideas which in turn creates a bias within the theories that leads them to focus on how ideas trigger change in times of crisis. In effect, the theories overlook incremental yet significant ideational change in times of stability. With inspiration from discourse theory and ‘the interpretive approach’, the article develops a more dynamic understanding of ideas as being composed of several related elements of meaning that typically do not reach a final stage of stability or equilibrium. Furthermore, it is argued that this theory of the micro structure of ideas can account for both incremental and paradigmatic ideational change. Two types of incremental ideational change are discussed and exemplified with empirical examples from British politics: first, a change in the relation between the existing elements of an idea and, second, a change of one or more (but not all) elements of an idea.

The Nature of Ideas, and Why Political Scientists Should Care: Analysing the Danish Jobcentre Reform from an Ideational Perspective

Research on the role of ideas has contributed greatly to our understanding of processes of policy change. The article suggests that theories that deal with interest-driven reform processes might also benefit in important ways from including ideas as a variable in their models. Arguing that ideas are useful to power-seeking actors, the article develops a theory about the nature of ideas that emphasises the dynamic and open-ended relation between actors and ideas: actors can use different strategies to affect ideas to work in their interest, but because of their intersubjective nature, ideas have a life of their own and are never fully controllable. Analysing the case of the Danish jobcentre reform it is demonstrated how ideas may be introduced by actors in order to promote their interests, but actors must use ideas with due attention to the historical background of the idea as well as which other ideas can be associated with them, both in present and future policy processes. In this way ideas create – with their dynamic nature – both possibilities and limits for power-seeking actors.

Institutional bricolage in times of crisis

How may we understand the occurrence of gradual but significant change following economic crisis? Theories of gradual institutional transformation offer important insights to analyses of long-term institutional change, but have so far shied away from dealing with institutional change during and following crisis, leaving the issue to more traditional critical juncture models. Instead of seeing gradual institutional change originating only in the efforts of rule takers to circumvent existing institutions – potentially leading to gradual change over longer periods of time – the paper suggests that in more abrupt processes of change characteristic of economic crisis, rule makers may also reinterpret the meaning of rules and redeploy them under significantly altered circumstances leading to gradual change. The paper suggests that the concept of bricolage is useful for understanding how policymakers create new institutional setups through the re-ordering of existing institutional elements. The empirical relevance of these arguments is demonstrated with a study of post-crisis special bank insolvency policies in Denmark and the United States, showing how in both polities new institutions were created from existing institutional elements.

Conceptualising ideational novelty: : A relational approach

Research Highlights and Abstract This article Gives clearer conceptualisation of what an idea is. Provides clearer conceptualisation of how ideas may change over time. Uses central arguments from relational sociology and conceptual analysis in discursive institutionalism. Provides new theoretical perspectives on ideational change in wake of the recent financial- and economic crisis. How can we conceptualise the emergence of new political ideas? Demonstrating that the discursive institutionalist literature is silent on this question, the article links this theoretical lacuna to the problem of ideational infinite regress, i.e. that if we try to identify the absolute origin of an idea, we find that the relations to other ideational elements develop ad infinitum and the end or beginning of the idea never appears. Ideas do not emerge from an absolute origin but instead are created when a set of ideational elements are yoked together by political actors. Three ways that ideational change occurs is suggested: a change in the relations in the idea (recasting the idea), the replacement of at least one of the existing ideational elements with ideational elements hitherto not part of the idea (renewing the idea) and finally a wholesale change of ideational elements in the idea (revolutionising the idea).

Ideas, Political Power and Public Policy

Throughout the last couple of decades, scholars have increasingly emphasized the importance of political ideas in understanding processes of change and stability in politics and public policy. The aim of ideational analysis in policy studies has not just been to theorize the representation or embodiment of ideas and the interactive processes by and through which ideas are generated and communicated. It has also underlined the importance of considering both ideas and discourse in the institutional context within which political actors both ‘power’ and ‘puzzle’. Naturally, the causal ‘power of ideas’ has been an important subject of study in the ideational tradition, spawning important studies on how ideas and ideologies are institutionalized and how they define the interests of strategic policy actors. The power of ideas has always reigned among the most important issues in ideational analysis. With this in mind, it may come as a surprise that relatively little has been done to more clearly conceptualize the relationship between the concept of political power and the role of ideas in public policy. The ideational side of power relations (which may be called ideational power) requires further study. At least part of this relative lack of connection to power theory seems attributable to ideational scholars’ strong focus on supporting the more general claim that ‘ideas matter’ as causes, thus carving out a clear position vis-à-vis more traditional interest-oriented approaches. This effort has clearly been fruitful – as seen not least by the growing attention to ideas within policy studies and political science more generally – but the central task of delineating how ideational scholarship can contribute to understandings of power remains. The present edited collection sets out to do so in two principal ways. First, building on existing ideational scholarship, contributors to this collection take on the task of investigating the relation between ideas and political power to develop clearer understandings of ideational power in policy research. Second, this collection is focused on conceptualizing the relationship between

Bringing Ideational Power into the Paradigm Approach: Critical Perspectives on Policy Paradigms in Theory and Practice

The work of Peter A. Hall (1993) on the role of policy paradigms in public policy is remarkable. Unrivalled by any other publication in ideational scholarship in terms of citations and impact, it — together with the work of scholars like Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith (1993), Kingdon (2003), Baumgartner and Jones (2009), and Stone (1988) — drew on the social learning-tradition (Heclo, 1974) to help bring ideas on the agenda of mainstream political science and policy studies (Beland & Cox, 2013; Blyth, 2013; Daigneault, 2014). With the subsequent important work of what may be termed ‘second generation ideational scholarship’ (e.g. Beland, 2007; Berman, 1998; Blyth, 2002; Campbell, 1997; Campbell & Pedersen, 2001; Cox, 2001; Lieberman, 2002; Schmidt, 2002), ideational frameworks for analyzing policymaking grew into a more or less coherent approach in its own right, what Schmidt (2008) later dubbed ‘discursive institutionalism.’ Hall’s (1993) theory of policy paradigms was essential for the coming of age of the ideational approach because while it placed institutions and interests centrally in its explanatory framework, ideas were the primary factor in accounting for processes of stability and change.

Legitimation as justification: Foregrounding public philosophies in explanations of gradual ideational change: FOREGROUNDING PUBLIC PHILOSOPHIES IN EXPLANATIONS OF GRADUAL IDEATIONAL CHANGE

In accounts of institutional change, discursive institutionalists point to the role of economic and political ideas in upending institutional stability and providing the raw material for the establishment of a new institutional setup. This approach has typically entailed a conceptualisation of ideas as coherent and monolithic and actors as almost automatically following the precepts of the ideas they hold and support. Recent theorising stresses how ideas are in fact composite and heterogeneous, and actors pragmatic and strategic in how they employ ideas in political struggles. However, this change of focus has, until recently, not included how foundational ideas of a polity, often referred to as ‘public philosophies’, are theorised to impact on institution‐building. Drawing on French Pragmatic Sociology, and taking as a starting point recent efforts within discursive institutionalism to conceptualise the dynamic nature of public philosophies, this article seeks to foreground moral justification in accounts of ideational and institutional change. It suggests that public philosophies are reflexively used by actors in continual processes of normative justification that may produce significant policy shifts over time. The empirical relevance of the argument is demonstrated through an analysis of gradual ideational and institutional change in French labour market policy, specifically the development from the state‐guaranteed minimum income scheme of 1988 to the neoliberal make‐work‐pay logic of the 2009 scheme, Revenu de solidarite active. The analysis shows that public and moral justifications have underpinned and gradually shaped these radical changes.

Book Review: Comparative: Coping with Crisis: Government Reactions to the Great Recession

If you really want to be smarter, reading can be one of the lots ways to evoke and realize. Many people who like reading will have more knowledge and experiences. Reading can be a way to gain information from economics, politics, science, fiction, literature, religion, and many others. As one of the part of book categories, coping with crisis government reactions to the great recession always becomes the most wanted book. Many people are absolutely searching for this book. It means that many love to read this kind of book.cases of humanitarian intervention in order to provide empirical background for comprehending controversies surrounding this concept. He highlights the crises in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Zimbabwe and Darfur, which offered little evidence of any new imperative to save suffering strangers, even though accompanied by well-rounded discourses about the responsibility to do so. The section concludes with the interventions in Côte d’Ivoire and Libya in 2011. These interventions revealed that despite the increasing robustness of normative consensus, practical action remains inconsistent. In the second part of the book, Weiss discusses the new dimension of war and humanitarian activities in a globalised world. The easy flow of arms across borders and facilitation of cross-border illegal activities contribute to the fragility of quasi-states and diminishing role of international humanitarian laws. Humanitarian action is therefore obliged to assume a politicised agenda, shifting from emergency relief to attacking root causes and post-conflict peace-building. Weiss subsequently provides the details of the contemporary norm of R2P, focusing on the ground-breaking work of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS). The Commission’s work is praised for its ability to condition sovereignty on human rights and R2P. Finally, Weiss examines what differences changing norms make to victims on the ground, emphasising the urgent need to translate agreed principles into universally delivered practices. The book combines Weiss’ renowned normative knowledge on the subject with his experience as research director of the ICISS report on Responsibility to Protect. Not only is it pitched at students looking for a clear and concise guide on the moral and political challenges of humanitarian intervention, but above all it is addressed to policy makers who are supposed to translate discourses into actions.

Coping with Crisis: Government Reactions to the Great Recession by Nancy Bermeo and Jonas Pontusson (eds). New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2012. 430pp., £42.50, ISBN 978 0871540768

If you really want to be smarter, reading can be one of the lots ways to evoke and realize. Many people who like reading will have more knowledge and experiences. Reading can be a way to gain information from economics, politics, science, fiction, literature, religion, and many others. As one of the part of book categories, coping with crisis government reactions to the great recession always becomes the most wanted book. Many people are absolutely searching for this book. It means that many love to read this kind of book.cases of humanitarian intervention in order to provide empirical background for comprehending controversies surrounding this concept. He highlights the crises in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Zimbabwe and Darfur, which offered little evidence of any new imperative to save suffering strangers, even though accompanied by well-rounded discourses about the responsibility to do so. The section concludes with the interventions in Côte d’Ivoire and Libya in 2011. These interventions revealed that despite the increasing robustness of normative consensus, practical action remains inconsistent. In the second part of the book, Weiss discusses the new dimension of war and humanitarian activities in a globalised world. The easy flow of arms across borders and facilitation of cross-border illegal activities contribute to the fragility of quasi-states and diminishing role of international humanitarian laws. Humanitarian action is therefore obliged to assume a politicised agenda, shifting from emergency relief to attacking root causes and post-conflict peace-building. Weiss subsequently provides the details of the contemporary norm of R2P, focusing on the ground-breaking work of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS). The Commission’s work is praised for its ability to condition sovereignty on human rights and R2P. Finally, Weiss examines what differences changing norms make to victims on the ground, emphasising the urgent need to translate agreed principles into universally delivered practices. The book combines Weiss’ renowned normative knowledge on the subject with his experience as research director of the ICISS report on Responsibility to Protect. Not only is it pitched at students looking for a clear and concise guide on the moral and political challenges of humanitarian intervention, but above all it is addressed to policy makers who are supposed to translate discourses into actions.