Journal ArticleDOI
Ideas and Social Policy: An Institutionalist Perspective
Reads0
Chats0
TLDR
The authors show how institutionalist scholarship can pay greater attention to ideational processes without abandoning its core assumptions about the structuring impact of political institutions and policy legacies on welfare state development.Abstract:
Since the beginning of the 1980s, historical institutionalism has emerged as one of the most influential theoretical perspectives in social policy studies. Although their work is insightful, most institutionalist scholars tend to relegate policy ideas to the back of their theoretical constructions dealing with welfare state development. The objective of this paper is to show how institutionalist scholarship can pay greater attention to ideational processes without abandoning its core assumptions about the structuring impact of political institutions and policy legacies on welfare state development. If institutions truly influence policy-making, policy ideas matter in and beyond the agenda-setting process. Related to existing policy legacies, perceived problems mesh with policy alternatives grounded in a specific paradigm. When stressing the need to reform, and promoting new alternatives, policy entrepreneurs draw on existing ideological repertoires to frame these alternatives. The ability to successfully frame policy alternatives can become a decisive aspect of the policy process. A discussion of recent European and North American policy debates illustrates these claims.read more
Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Gender As a Social Structure Theory Wrestling with Activism
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that we need to conceptualize gender as a social structure, and by doing so, we can better analyze the ways in which gender is embedded in the individual, interactional, and institutional dimensions of our society.
Journal ArticleDOI
Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher, and the Politics of Retrenchment
TL;DR: In this paper, it is shown how to find a user's guide to operate a product on the web. But this is not a good way to obtain details about operating certain products.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Divided Welfare State: The Battle over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States
TL;DR: In this article, a new book about the divided welfare state and the battle over public and private social benefits in the United States to read is presented. But reading is not only for those who have obligation to read.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Futures of European Capitalism
TL;DR: In the absence of this analysis, we do not know if social capital is really driving political development or some other factor, such as economic development as mentioned in this paper, which includes social capital as one of its explanatory factors.
BookDOI
Ideas and politics in social science research
Daniel Béland,Robert Henry Cox +1 more
TL;DR: The Varied Roles of Ideas in Politics: From "Whether" to "How", Jal Mehta as discussed by the authors, has been a popular topic in the field of political science.
References
More filters
Book
Agendas, alternatives, and public policies
TL;DR: In this article, the authors discuss the origins, rationality, incrementalism, and Garbage Cans of the idea of agenda status and present a case study of noninterview measures of Agenda status.
Journal ArticleDOI
Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors conceptualized path dependence as a social process grounded in a dynamic of increasing returns, and demonstrated that increasing returns processes are likely to be prevalent and that good analytical foundations exist for exploring their causes and consequences.
Journal ArticleDOI
Policy paradigms, social learning, and the state: the case of economic policymaking in Britain
TL;DR: The authors examined the role of ideas in policy making, based on the concept of policy paradigms, and found that a conventional model of social learning fit some types of changes in policy well but not the movement from Keynesian to monetarist modes of policymaking.
Journal ArticleDOI
Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms
TL;DR: The term "New Institutionalism" is a term that now appears with growing frequency in political science as mentioned in this paper, and there is considerable confusion about just what the new institutionalism is, how it differs from other approaches, and what sort of promise or problems it displays.
Book ChapterDOI
Historical institutionalism in comparative politics
TL;DR: The authors provides an overview of recent developments in historical institutionalism and assesses the progress in understanding institutional formation and change, drawing on insights from recent historical institutional work on icritical juncturesi and on ipolicy feedbacks.