How to study ideas in politics and ‘influence’: a typology

Abstract

The influence that ideas have (or do not have) in political life is widely regarded as a problematic issue – across many fields of study. Reservations about the possibilities for assessing ideas' influence can be shown to differ, however, in quite revealing ways. Apprehension rests neither on a single, shared reservation, nor even on a core set of reservations. Moreover, many of the reservations lack cogency. A more useful way of addressing the ‘influence-problem’ is by employing a typology. This typology would seek to capture the full range of modes in which influence might be exercised. The article therefore proposes one, as a heuristic framework for investigation and analysis, with the intention that it might be applied to the study of ‘real-world’ cases.

Keywords:

• influence
• ideas
• ideologies
• typology
• political thought

Acknowledgements

I would like to extend special thanks to Cécile Hatier, Richard North and Andrew Shorten for their feedback on earlier drafts of this article. I am also grateful for comments received from various anonymous readers.

Notes

1. Freeden's ‘morphological’ approach to ideology research (1996) is the most established, and casts the historical development of ideologies in terms of changes in conceptual assemblages. However, occasional pointers aside, it declines to provide any vocabulary that might help to gauge variation within that (or any other) process of change. Also pertinent is the literature on ideological adaptation (e.g. Vincent 1999).

2. Should he be sympathetic to the more radical versions of the ‘linguistic turn’, the ideational political scientist will even be likely to think that ideas – as the product of ‘discursive construction’ – are themselves constitutive of political realities, as opposed to being external and prior to realities they go on to influence. Cf. Berger and Luckmann (1991).

3. This is perhaps to stretch the point but as a rough characterisation it stands up. The ‘discursive’ evidence that ideational political scientists typically provide in the first instance is sometimes buttressed by further types of evidence – for instance, cross-case comparisons capable of supporting the argument that actors in objectively similar situations pursued different courses because of varying ideas. But even when this move is made it is conceded that variation might still be accounted for by structural and/ or institutional differences in the situations which initially pass unnoticed.

4. For criticism, see Carstensen (2011).

5. Just two examples from the back catalogue of the Journal of the History of Ideas.

6. Skinner's explicit remarks on the influence-problem provide some quite stringent ‘necessary conditions’ for employing the term, conditions which, he suggests, in conventional practice rarely come close to being satisfied. But in the very least good and bad practice is distinct.

7. To be clear, Bevir's approach is also well-established within ideational political science, where it is dubbed ‘interpretivist’ rather than post-analytic and hermeneutic. Furthermore, there is caution to distinguish objective pressures from their (more important) interpretations (Bevir and Rhodes, 2003, p. 36).

8. Note that this is a different employment of “translation” than conventional in ideational political science where it is made to describe what happens to ideas, in the short term, as they interact with policy contexts.

9. Cf. Gadamer (1975, p. xix): ‘Understanding is never subjective behaviour toward a given ‘object’, but toward its effective history – the history of its influence’.

10. Recall ‘affected’ influence, discussed earlier. This is one other apt term for analytical employment, denoting something specific about non-influence.

11. The pathology metaphor is Lukes’ (2004). We might also note a similar linguistic sleight of hand operates to obscure the influence-problem in political philosophy, where destination metaphors are popular: for example, ‘long-term goals’ are thought of as‘worked toward’ in ‘gradual steps’ (Rawls, 2001, p. 89).

12. Note that adoptive influence can also function in inverted, negative form: the actor doing the adopting defines a position in explicit opposition to the prior ideas.