Power Through, Over and In Ideas: Conceptualizing Ideational Power in Discursive Institutionalism
Journal of European Public Policy
Abstract
Owing to the tendency of discursive institutionalists to conflate the notion that “ideas matter” for policymaking with the “power of ideas”, little has been done to explicitly theorize ideational power. To fill this lacuna, the paper defines ideational power as the capacity of actors (whether individual or collective) to influence other actors' normative and cognitive beliefs through the use of ideational elements, and – based on insights from the discursive institutionalist literature – suggests three different types of ideational power: power through ideas, understood as the capacity of actors to persuade other actors to accept and adopt their views through the use of ideational elements; power over ideas, meaning the imposition of ideas and the power to resist the inclusion of alternative ideas into the policymaking arena; and power in ideas, which takes place through the establishing of hegemony or institutions imposing constraints on what ideas are considered.
... Refletindo sobre a relação entre ideias e interesses, deve-se chamar a atenção para o fato de que interesses são, eles próprios, qualidades das ideias (Béland, 2019;Carstensen;Schmidt, 2016;Cox, 2011). Hay (2011) chama a atenção para o fato de que interesses não são fatos objetivos, mas construções históricas, sociais e políticas, e que esse nexo entre ideias e política desafia a visão materialista tradicional acerca dos interesses, que percebe as ideias como instrumentos utilizados por atores para se promoverem. ...
... Refletindo sobre a relação entre ideias e interesses, deve-se chamar a atenção para o fato de que interesses são, eles próprios, qualidades das ideias (Béland, 2019;Carstensen;Schmidt, 2016;Cox, 2011). Hay (2011) chama a atenção para o fato de que interesses não são fatos objetivos, mas construções históricas, sociais e políticas, e que esse nexo entre ideias e política desafia a visão materialista tradicional acerca dos interesses, que percebe as ideias como instrumentos utilizados por atores para se promoverem. ...
... Assim, conceituam-se três tipos de manifestação de poder em relação às ideias: poder por meio (through) de ideias, entendido como a capacidade dos atores de persuadir outros atores a aceitarem e adotarem seus pontos de vista por meio do uso de elementos ideacionais; poder sobre (over) as ideias, significando a imposição de ideias e o poder de resistir à inclusão de ideias alternativas na arena de formulação de políticas; e o poder nas (in) ideias, que se dá por meio do estabelecimento de hegemonia ou de instituições que impõem restrições para a consideração de ideias (Carstensen;Schmidt, 2016). ...
Apresenta-se, neste artigo, uma reflexão sobre as relações entre democracia e políticas culturais. Enfatiza-se que não há relação necessária entre políticas culturais e democracia, e que, em democracias, as políticas culturais assumem formas institucionais específicas de governança que envolvem a participação dos cidadãos ao longo do ciclo da política. Com apoio no arcabouço epistemológico do neoinstitucionalismo ideacional e a ferramenta da análise de conteúdo, analisam-se as ideias contidas nos programas de governo e discursos de vitória de Bolsonaro (2018) e de Lula (2022), bem como os contextos políticos e imagens desses momentos. Argumenta-se que as “convicções causais” em seus programas influíram diretamente no desenho organizacional do Ministério da Cultura, em ambos os governos (2018; 2022), e geraram duas imagens de políticas culturais: a cultura como medo e a cultura como esperança.
... This article critically engages with PD through the lens of discursive institutionalism (Schmidt, 2010). It acknowledges the 'power in' ideas around state diplomacy (Carstensen & Schmidt, 2016). However, it explores how parliamentarians construct, challenge and reconfigure state diplomacy within the PPA and in a post-Brexit context. ...
... As mentioned, there is 'power in' ideas (Carstensen & Schmidt, 2016) surrounding state diplomacy. Therefore, the five diplomatic functions in the Vienna Convention (1961) provide a baseline to map out points of confluence and divergence with interparliamentary relations in the PPA context. ...
... A discursive institutionalist lens has shown that there is 'power in' (Carstensen & Schmidt, 2016) ideas around state diplomacy as a benchmark when discussing PD. However, actors challenged and reshaped these ideas in a PPA context. ...
This article makes a critical engagement with the concept of parliamentary diplomacy, to understand interparliamentary relations in EU-UK Parliamentary Partnership Assembly (PPA). It first situates the PPA and its formal institutional features against multiple inter-parliamentary frameworks. Then, through an analysis of parliamentary debates, five sessions, and interviews, it explores parliamentary actors' understandings of parliamentary diplomacy in the PPA, vis-à-vis diplomatic functions. The study finds that parliamentary diplomacy may be a useful term to make sense of EU-UK interparliamentary relations. However, the European Parliament's actors are more likely than their UK counterparts to use the term. Parliamentary diplomacy is constructed as important but that its role is differentiated by function and issue. Looking ahead, parliamentary diplomacy as an appropriate label may be subject to change, depending on the strength of UK-EU cooperation, the institutional development of the PPA and future relationships between UK and EU executives.
... Within complex organisations, such as universities, individuals try to influence each other's positions and beliefs, leveraging arguments and their 'ideational power' (Carstensen & Schmidt, 2016). The power of specific ideas hinges not only on their alignment with organisational structures but also on the agency of key playersuniversity managers, academics, administrators -who pursue diverse agendas. ...
1 (Eng)
Preparing student teachers for work in increasingly diverse Nordic schools has brought attention to the value of internationalisation that, until recently, was debated primarily in other disciplinary contexts within higher education settings. In this article, we examine how internationalisation is introduced and integrated in two teacher education providers in Finland and Sweden. Drawing on internationalisation as a policy idea with distinct cognitive and normative properties, we explore rationales, values and attitudes that underpin internationalisation positions and practices. The comparative study identifies different ways that the two providers introduced internationalisation into their existing practices, and, to some extent, different meanings and emphases internationalisation has in the two institutional settings. In both cases, the filtering of this policy idea and its embeddedness into teacher education is contingent upon curricular and organisational structures; university and faculty leadership; attitudes and commitments of academic staff.
2 (German)
Lehramtsausbildung und Internationalisierung: Policies und Praktiken in Finnland und Schweden
Die zunehmende Diversität nordeuropäischer Schulen, für die Lehramtsstudierende ausgebildet werden, lenkt die Aufmerksamkeit auf den Wert von Internationalisierung, die bis vor Kurzem vor allem in anderen disziplinären Kontexten der Hochschulbildung diskutiert wurde. In diesem Artikel untersuchen wir, wie Internationalisierung in zwei Lehrerausbildungsinstitutionen in Finnland und Schweden implementiert wird. Unter Rückgriff auf den Begriff der Internationalisierung als Policy-Konzept mit spezifischen kognitiven und normativen Dimensionen untersuchen wir die zugrunde liegenden Begründungen, Wertvorstellungen und Einstellungen, die Internationalisierungsstrategien und -praktiken prägen. Die vergleichende Analyse zeigt, dass die beiden Institutionen Internationalisierung auf unterschiedliche Weise in ihre bestehenden Strukturen integriert haben und dass dem Konzept in den beiden institutionellen Kontexten teilweise unterschiedliche Bedeutungen und Schwerpunkte zugeschrieben werden. In beiden Fällen wird die Einbettung dieses politischen Konzepts in der Lehrerausbildung durch curriculare und organisatorische Strukturen, die Führungsstrategien von Universitäten und Fakultäten sowie die Haltungen und das Engagement des wissenschaftlichen Personals bedingt.
... Within complex organisations, such as universities, individuals try to influence each other's positions and beliefs, leveraging arguments and their 'ideational power' (Carstensen & Schmidt, 2016). The power of specific ideas hinges not only on their alignment with organisational structures but also on the agency of key playersuniversity managers, academics, administrators -who pursue diverse agendas. ...
Discursive institutionalism and its contribution to curriculum research. This article develops the argument that discursive institu-tionalism is a constructive contribution to curriculum research. Starting from the linguistic turn in curriculum theory, it is argued that discursive institutionalism contributes to curriculum research in at least two ways: First, it contributes to the understanding of the institutionalisation of curriculum discourses, and second, it contributes to the analyses of the interactions within and between curriculum arenas and institutional levels. The article concludes that in combining an interest for discursive interaction, discursive content and the actors involved in interactions, discursive institutionalism enables dynamic analyses of both curriculum change and continuity. Den språkliga vändningen inom läroplansteorin under senare delen av 1900-talet öppnade upp för nya sätt att analysera och förstå läro-planen som en diskursiv praktik (Englund 2011). Från att tidigare ha sett språket som en representativ beskrivning av en objektiv verk-lighet så öppnade den språkliga vändningen inom filosofin upp för en fördjupad förståelse för språkets performativitet och för sociala praktikers diskursiva dimensioner (jämför Rorty 1967; Habermas 1995). Idag utmärks läroplanen som diskursiv praktik av en tilltagande komplexitet och den diskursiva interaktionen inbegriper många olika aktörer på olika arenor. De mest självklara arenorna är de politiska,
Does worker voice on social media empower individuals to advocate for better working conditions when traditional voice mechanisms are absent? This study examined Chinese tech workers’ use of social media to resist overwork culture. The analysis of social media data, interviews, and news published by state-affiliated outlets shows worker voice on social media raised public awareness of overtime issues and increased state-run media coverage of overtime issues, culminating in a landmark ruling in China’s Supreme People’s Court against exploitative practices. However, online debates on the legitimacy of these overtime practices failed to build a lasting consensus in support of workers. Inconsistent enforcement of labor laws and administrative directives further weakened the protection of tech workers. Ultimately, while social media amplified worker voice, it failed to drive meaningful workplace improvements in a context in which workers lacked associational and institutional power.
This dissertation sets out to analyze the ways that Canadian policy stakeholders frame
prescription opioids and the overdose crisis via a multi-case study of three distinct federal policy
responses to the crisis. This was achieved by examining framings within three federal policy
arenas that explicitly pertained to the role of prescription opioids in the overdose crisis: Member
of Parliaments’ and Senators’ efforts to mandate abuse-deterrent formulations; Health Canada’s
consultations on marketing and advertising restrictions; and the Canadian Pain Task Force’s
creation of national pain guidelines. Taken together, this multi-case study highlights an ongoing
contestation over the root causes of the overdose crisis, with a number of important findings:
First, stakeholders’ framings fostered dichotomies around legitimate and illegitimate use, often
reliant on distinguishing medical approval from all other forms of use. Within this binary,
illegitimate opioid use was consistently framed as abuse, misuse, extra-medical use, and/or
addiction, contingent on the stakeholders’ broader problem definitions. Second, while
stakeholders framed medical validation as a key factor for establishing the “legitimate patient,”
they also consistently acknowledged the limitations of medical validation as a reliable source of
iii
legitimacy by criticizing the growing reticence among prescribers to provide opioids, lamenting
“pill mill” physicians, and noting how easily government regulations could influence prescribers’
views of opioids. Third, in trying to address prescription and illicit opioid harms simultaneously,
any restrictions on – or even related to – prescription opioids were framed as potentially shifting
individuals to the illicit opioid supply and, therefore, exacerbating the overdose crisis. This
highlighted the thin line between “safer supply,” which is generally considered for people with
opioid use disorders, and “continued access” to prescribed opioids, which are prescribed for the
management of chronic pain. Finally, a heterogenous groups of stakeholders – with highly
differing interests and policy priorities – formed together to create “framing coalitions”: groups
of stakeholders that unintentionally replicated one another’s and the opioid industry framings.
This served as an important form of discursive power for the opioid industry. Overall, these
framings have significant implications for where policy efforts and resources are allocated, as
well as how policymakers and the public come to attribute responsibility for the crisis.
Detta bokkapitel, som är en del av en vänbok till kommunforskaren tillika prof. i statsvetenskap Stig Montin, tar utgångspunkt i Montins och hans kollegors forskning om kommunala demokratiexperiment för att analysera hur deras iakttagelser från 1980- och 1990-talen kan bidra till förståelsen av dagens kommunala experiment och försöksverksamheter. Syftet med kapitlet är tvådelat: dels att identifiera kontinuiteter och potentiella lärdomar från tidigare studier, dels att belysa skillnader – dagens experiment är ofta inriktade på innovation och hållbarhet snarare än demokrati. Genom denna jämförelse är ambitionen att synliggöra de demokratifrågor som i dag riskerar att marginaliseras.
Why have neo-liberal economic ideas been so resilient since the 1980s, despite major intellectual challenges, crippling financial and political crises, and failure to deliver on their promises? Why do they repeatedly return, not only to survive but to thrive? This groundbreaking book proposes five lines of analysis to explain the dynamics of both continuity and change in neo-liberal ideas: The flexibility of neo-liberalism's core principles; the gaps between neo-liberal rhetoric and reality; the strength of neo-liberal discourse in debates; the power of interests in the strategic use of ideas; and the force of institutions in the embedding of neo-liberal ideas. The book's highly distinguished group of authors shows how these possible explanations apply across the most important domains-fiscal policy, the role of the state, welfare and labour markets, regulation of competition and financial markets, management of the Euro, and corporate governance-in the European Union and across European countries.
This book picks up where Karl Polanyi's study of economic and political change left off. Building upon Polanyi's conception of the double movement, Blyth analyzes the two periods of deep seated institutional change that characterized the twentieth century: the 1930s and the 1970s. Blyth views both sets of changes as part of the same dynamic. In the 1930s labor reacted against the exigencies of the market and demanded state action to mitigate the market's effects by 'embedding liberalism.' In the 1970s, those who benefited least from such 'embedding' institutions, namely business, reacted against these constraints and sought to overturn that institutional order. Blyth demonstrates the critical role economic ideas played in making institutional change possible. Great Transformations rethinks the relationship between uncertainty, ideas, and interests, achieving profound new insights on how, and under what conditions, institutional change takes place.
Political Analysis provides an accessible and engaging yet original introduction and distinctive contribution, to the analysis of political structures, institutions, ideas and behaviours, and above all, to the political processes through which they are constantly made and remade. Following an innovative introduction to the main approaches and concepts in political analysis, the text focuses thematically on the key issues which currently concern and divide political analysts, including the boundaries of the political; the question of structure, agency and power; the dynamics of political change; the relative significance of ideas and material factors; and the challenge posed by postmodernism which the author argues the discipline can strengthen itself by addressing without allowing it to become a recipe for paralysis.
This introductory chapter first sets out the purpose of the book, which is to bring together scattered pieces of knowledge and offer social scientists a critical assessment of the theoretical and empirical issues raised by the ever-expanding social science literature on ideas and politics. Ranging across several fields of political science and sociology (American politics, comparative politics, international relations, political economy, political sociology, and public policy), the book documents central themes in the burgeoning literature on ideas and politics, while offering critical analyses to guide future social science research. It pays considerable attention to showing how ideas shape political behavior and outcomes and how focusing on ideas provides richer explanations of politics. The chapter then discusses the development of ideational research and presents an overview of the subsequent chapters.
This book focuses on the impact of European integration on national democracies. It argues that the democratic deficit is indeed a problem, but not so much at the level of the European Union per se as at the national level. This is because national leaders and publics have yet to come to terms with the institutional impact of the EU on the traditional workings of their national democracies. The book begins with a discussion of what the EU is - a new form of regional state in which sovereignty is shared, boundaries are variable, identity composite, and democracy fragmented. But the main focus of the book is on how the EU has altered national governance practices, thereby challenging national ideas about democracy. It finds that the EU's 'policy without politics' has led to 'politics without policy' at the national level. The book also shows that institutional 'fit' matters. The compound EU, in which governing activity is highly dispersed among multiple authorities, is more disruptive to simple polities like Britain and France, where governing activity has traditionally been more concentrated in a single authority, than to similarly compound polities like Germany and Italy. The book concludes that the real problem for member-states is not so much that their democratic practices have changed as that national ideas and discourse about democracy have not. The failure has been one of the communicative discourse to the general public - a problem which again has been more pronounced for simple polities, despite political leaders' potentially greater capacity to communicate through a single voice, than for compound polities, where the coordinative discourse among policymakers predominates.
Introduction It is difficult to find an account of the ‘neo-liberal’ decades since 1980 that does not reserve a special place for unshackled financial markets. This is true not only for the United States but also for the European economies that are the focus of this volume and chapter. Critics commonly portray globalized and deregulated finance as the lynchpin of the neo-liberal economic order. International capital mobility has shifted the balance of power in favour of capital at the expense of labour, so the argument goes. Furthermore, credit institutions let loose have eased the pain of growing income inequality by showering unsustainable credit on households across the OECD world. These policies have been inspired or, at least, justified by neo-liberal ideas about financial markets and their regulation: that markets can ensure an efficient distribution of capital and financial services and that governments should either promote such efficiency through market-enhancing regulation and the enforcement of competition or take a hands-off approach altogether. In the panoply of ideas about state-market relations, ideas about finance occupy a special place. Textbooks in the field emphasize individual rationality and efficiency and portray wholesale finance as quintessential markets: liquidity is high, information asymmetries and transaction costs are low, and equal assets have equal prices around the world. Because of their virtual character, contemporary financial markets have lent themselves to the practical application of abstract economic ideas more than other societal domains. That makes neo-liberal ideas powerful in contemporary finance but also vulnerable: in the event of a crisis, we can expect these ideas to attract much of the blame rather than exogenous material factors, such as adverse weather conditions in case of a famine or demographic change causing strains in pension systems.
At a meeting of US and Soviet climatologists in Leningrad in 1982 I became aware of the sensitivity of the Arctic to climate change resulting from increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere by burning fossil fuels. The eminent Soviet climate specialist, Mikhail Budyko, suggested that we had set in motion a sequence of events that would lead to melting of the Arctic ice pack by 2100, and that would have grave consequences for the entire planet. But what is happening is not gradual warming, and the increasing number of weather events suggest that our planet is beginning to move from one climate state to another. Rather than ‘Global Warming’ we should speak of ‘Global Weirding.’ I have been a life-long academic. I started out my research as a micropaleontologist, studying tiny microscopic fossils. Then I became interested in oceanography and finally in Earth’s past climate. I have spent the last 40 years trying to understand the warm climate of the Cretaceous period, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Science is a search for the truth, wherever it may lead. There is no good or evil in such a search. There are two different kinds of scientific investigation. One group of sciences, physics, chemistry, and biology, performs and evaluates the results of experiments. Geology and astronomy are different in that they must rely largely on interpretation of observations. In both cases, the results of the investigations lead to ideas that can be tested, either by new experiments or by observations. These preliminary explanations are termed ‘hypotheses.’ If they stand the test of time and intensive experimentation, they become theories. ‘Occam’s razor’ is the principle that the simplest explanation is the most likely to be correct. And if it is concluded that a theory is absolutely correct, it is termed a Law. Note that the general public often uses the term ‘theory’ to correspond to a scientists ‘hypothesis.’