The Transformation of Policy Ideas

A wave of recent scholarship, embracing both rational choice and cultural approaches, highlights the importance of collective ideas in explaining politics. What this work has not adequately addressed, however, is why collective ideas sometimes radically change. Scholars typically attribute ideational change ad hoc to creative entrepreneurial agents or to exogenous shock. But these solutions fail to account for why some entrepreneurs and not others are successful in marketing their ideas or why similar shocks lead to change in one instance but continuity in another. Explaining these variations is aided by conceptualizing ideational change as a two-stage process involving collapse and consolidation. Collapse involves societal actors reaching an agreement that the old orthodoxy is inadequate. Consolidation requires social coordination on a replacement set of ideas. Both steps involve collective ideation problems where actors may have difficulty coordinating a change in dominant ideas or have incentives to shirk facilitating efficient adaptation. The outcome of these two steps is in part endogenous to ideational structure itself. Collective ideas generate expectations, which in particular ways interact with experienced events, either inhibiting change or allowing societies to transform their own dominant notions. The approach is illustrated with examples involving collectively held causal ideas in a variety of foreign policy domains. cross a variety of literatures, scholars have taken a renewed interest in the role of collectively held ideas and beliefs in politics. Rational choice scholars have turned to collective ideas both to explain how societies make decisions under uncertainty and to resolve multiple equilibria problems (Kreps 1990; Ferejohn 1991; Garrett and Weingast 1993). A second group of scholars working more closely in a sociological/cultural framework have rediscovered and refined the explanatory power of ideas in a variety of issue areas including macroeconomic policy, trade, industrial strategy, national security, and internal security (Hall 1989; Sikkink 1991; Dobbin 1994; Katzenstein 1996a,b). But what both groups have not explained adequately is why enduring dominant ideas sometimes radically shift. What is necessary, but missing, is an explanation of discontinuous change in collective ideas.1 Explaining such change is a concern well beyond the study of politics as seen in the debates in the history and philosophy of science literature (Andersson 1994). In this article, however, I address the problem of ideational change with particular reference to policy concepts, especially foreign policy concepts held by societies we know as nation states. Why do collective ideas sometimes undergo dramatic transformation, yet at other points show basic continuity? The array of extant answers to this question is usefully examined within the agent-structure debate that has shaped economics, sociology, and political science. While each of the three main positions in this debate-agentic, structuralist, and structurationist-all provide insights, each addresses the issue of change problematically. The standard solution to their pitfalls is to invoke "exogenous shock" as the source of change-but this factor is only recognized post hoc because a change has occurred. Instead what is needed is a better-specified notion of how events relate to the causal mechanisms of the three positions, either in support of ideational continuity or as a source of change.