Abstract
The recent ideational turn in political science and public administration implies that ideas matter. Ideas are an essential explanatory concept for understanding policy changes and decision-making processes. The aim of the paper is to specify how ideas matter as a variable in public policy research, providing students and scholars of public policy with a stock take of the current state-of-the-art literature on ideas in political science and public administration. The paper first identifies three approaches to ideas as a variable in the policy process. It then discusses where ideas come from and the dynamics and drivers of ideational change to shed light on the ideational mechanisms underpinning policy processes. Furthermore, it taps into different research methods that can be used to study ideas. Finally, the paper concludes with five lessons for future research endeavours on the study of ideas in public policy.
Highlights
The recent ideational turn in political science and public administration implies that ideas matter
The aim of the paper is to specify how ideas matter as a variable in public policy research, providing students and scholars of public policy with a stock take of the current state-of-the-art literature on ideas in political science and public administration
This paper demonstrated that ideational scholarship in public policy evolved along several distinct lines of inquiry
Summary
N.B. For articles coded as theoretical or introduction to special issue, the subsequent methodology code was not applied. Inductive coding of methods used in the different articles to uncover how scholars aim to study ideas. N.A. when articles did not contain methodology. Unspecified when methodology was not made explicit Excerpts from article text or notes that centre around the key question of the article, its main insights and the conclusions. Used for drafting concluding section on future research agenda for ideational scholarship
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