Bridging ideas and policy design

Abstract

Much has been written about the role of ideas in public policy. As the more recent ideational scholarship suggests, having established that ideas matter, our efforts should now be directed at how they matter across different political and policy settings (Jacobs, 2011; Mehta, 2011). In this chapter, we show how ideas matter specifically during the process of policy design by offering a critical survey of two distinct bodies of scholarship, which we seek to bridge in a systematic way. We highlight the points of correspondence that the design and ideational literatures find in their shared discussion of overarching policy styles and paradigms; formulation processes marked by bricolage; and the interaction of policy actors and their preferred frames in their quest for defining policy goals and the tools to reach them. The chapter concludes with an agenda for future research on the ideas and policy design nexus, which would benefit from the construction of more permanent and solid bridges between the two major streams of scholarship discussed in the chapter.