Ideas and power: four intersections and how to show them

ABSTRACT

The notion that ideas powerfully shape policies seems highly intuitive. How actors think about policy matters, and their thinking is not just a mechanistic function of uninterpreted conditions around them. Yet turning this intuition into clear claims about the influence of ideas is challenging. This contribution extracts guidelines from the growing literature on ideas to suggest how to best display four common kinds of intersections between ideas and context that make the ideas powerful. We can show that certain ideas gain influence because ‘believers’ obtain power for unrelated reasons; because the ideas somehow empower actors to achieve power; because they make possible new coalitions of actors; or because they inform the crafting or retooling of institutions that matter. The essay highlights what some of the strongest literature on ideas does well and how it can become still more persuasive.

KEY WORDS:

• Explanation
• ideas
• methods
• power
• public policy

Notes

1 Biernacki's wording is that his study shows ‘that culture exercised an influence of its own but not completely by itself’ (emphasis original).

2 Many postmodern scholars make important claims about the influence of ideas, even if their epistemology discourages phrasings that could satisfy my criteria. Strong examples are de Goede (2005) and Epstein (2008).

3 See Parsons (2003: ch. 4).

4 Hall (1993:, 290) makes similar points, contrasting how the Heath government in the early 1970s lacked a clear sense of the policy options that Thatcher later advanced.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Craig Parsons

Biographical note

Craig Parsons is professor of political science, University of Oregon.