Ideas, Political Power and Public Policy

Throughout the last couple of decades, scholars have increasingly emphasized the importance of political ideas in understanding processes of change and stability in politics and public policy. The aim of ideational analysis in policy studies has not just been to theorize the representation or embodiment of ideas and the interactive processes by and through which ideas are generated and communicated. It has also underlined the importance of considering both ideas and discourse in the institutional context within which political actors both ‘power’ and ‘puzzle’. Naturally, the causal ‘power of ideas’ has been an important subject of study in the ideational tradition, spawning important studies on how ideas and ideologies are institutionalized and how they define the interests of strategic policy actors. The power of ideas has always reigned among the most important issues in ideational analysis. With this in mind, it may come as a surprise that relatively little has been done to more clearly conceptualize the relationship between the concept of political power and the role of ideas in public policy