Ideas Matter Research Articles

How Ideas Influence Decision-Making: Olof Palme and Swedish foreign policy, 1965–1975

The main research question in this study is how ideas matter during different phases of a decision-making process. More specifically, the study examines whether principled and causal ideas influence foreign policy as roadmaps or as focal points, and if there is a difference across policy-making stages. The empirical basis for this article is an examination of whether former Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme (1927–1986) primarily used his ideas as roadmaps for one of his foreign policy priorities during an early agenda-setting phase of the process, and ideas as focal points for one of his foreign policy priorities during a policy-making phase. The two cases studied are (1) Sweden's decision to say no to European Economic Community membership in the early 1970s and (2) Sweden's decision to say yes to support liberation movements in Africa in the late 1960s. The main conclusion is that Palme used his ideas as roadmaps during all phases of the decision-making process, and that ideas are necessary to guide and frame all types of issues during all stages of the decision-making process.

ON ERROR: UNDISCIPLINED THOUGHTS ON ONE OF THE CAUSES OF INTELLECTUAL PATH DEPENDENCY

Düşünceler tarihinde insan ediminin mükemmel olmayan karakterine (yani, hata yapma kabiliyetine) ne kadar yer ayrılmıştır? Konvansiyonel düşünce tarihi yazımı içinde hemen hemen hiç. Oysa entellektüel tarih bu tür hatalarla doludur ve bu hatalar entelektüel patikaya bağımlılığın en büyük sebebidir. Entellektüel patikalar, düşünsel hataların sonuçlarının ortadan kalkmaması sebebiyle düşünürleri kendisine bağımlı hale getirir. Hatalar ne kadar küçük olursa olsun pozitif geri bildirimler nedeniyle düşünsel patikalar, çoğu zaman, düşünsel patolojilere dönüşür. Bu koşullar altında, bazı hatalar düzeltilse bile, düşüncelerin genel evrimi mükemmellik seviyesine yakınsamaz.

De Gustibus Est Disputandum – Behavioral Foundations of Constitutional Political Economy

This paper emphasizes an old idea: ideas matter. They affect economic and most importantly political behavior. Economists have started to question the primacy of formal institutions as determinants for economic development, and to accept the fact that the causality between ideas and institutions is bidirectional, and to explore this process. Rational choice type explanations start with preferences and beliefs as data. However, preferences and beliefs are themselves shaped by the necessities of social co-existence. Where the strict rational choice approach starts with a lone Robinson Crusoe, a constitutional political psychology explains mental processes as shaped by actual evolutionary and historical constrains. If we can develop a better understanding of belief and preference formation it might be possible to explain the development of formal institutions.

Zeev Sternhell . The Anti‐Enlightenment Tradition . Translated by David Maisel . New Haven : Yale University Press . 2010 . Pp. xi, 532. $55.00.

Widely reputed to be an expert on the intellectual antecedents of fascism, Zeev Sternhell has produced works marked by moral passion and a corresponding conviction that ideas matter, and have mattered, profoundly. In this new book, a revised and expanded translation of the French edition published in 2006, the author considerably widens both his range of intellectual references and the stakes of his argument. Not only did the anti-Enlightenment intellectual tradition prepare the way for fascism, but it constituted “an upheaval that continues to have a profound effect on the society of our time” (p. 404). Sternhell unequivocally embraces what he calls the Franco-Kantian Enlightenment tradition, based on such familiar notions as rationalism, universalism, individualism, and the scope for engineering societal improvement. In doing so he provides a good sense of the affirmative, optimistic side of that tradition, which, as he argues, is sometimes too quickly denigrated. But his major concern is to counter what he takes to have been the deleterious tradition of anti-Enlightenment thought that began in the later eighteenth century, and that was itself novel, modern, even revolutionary in reacting against the revolutionary implications of the Enlightenment departure.

Ideas Meet Institutions and the People Rise Up: Four Ideas and the Strange Century of Health Reform

Few ideas have been pursued as long and as doggedly – or opposed quite as ferociously – as national health care. In this paper, I use the quest for NHI to reflect on just how ideas matter within the great grind of institutions, interests, and political time. The four ideas: social insurance, lockean liberalism (or dread of government), neo progressive technique, and market competition.

Revolutionary Conceptions: Women, Fertility, and Family Limitation in America, 1760-1820 (review)

Reviewed by: Revolutionary Conceptions: Women, Fertility, and Family Limitation in America, 1760-1820 Marie Jenkins Schwartz (bio) Revolutionary Conceptions: Women, Fertility, and Family Limitation in America, 1760-1820. By Susan E. Klepp. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Pp. 328. $65.00 cloth; $24.95 paper) Modern societies have seen a dramatic fall in birthrates, a trend that began in the United States and France during the second half of the eighteenth century. Susan E. Klepp offers as explanation for why birth rates began to fall in the United States. It was not, as others have claimed, because families found it difficult to acquire land for rising generations, nor was it a result of industrialization or the rise of the market economy, religious reform, breakthroughs in medical technology, or trends in mortality. Rather, women in the middle ranks of society began to start families later, increase the time between births, and stop bearing children at younger ages. In other words, it was an American revolution "invented and implemented by wives" (p. 8). Their reimagined view of marriage, motherhood, and procreation changed the world, which gradually came to see that childbirth and infant care represented a stage in a woman's life rather than a lifetime commitment. Klepp's use of sources demonstrates a firm command of the historiography related to the study of sex, sexuality, and reproduction, as well as an ability to imagine new approaches to research in the field. Just as the first historians to focus on fertility began with statistical studies, so does Klepp. Her first chapter synthesizes the literature historians and demographers have compiled on the subject. Klepp concludes that statistics can only take historians so far and bases subsequent chapters on other types of documentary evidence, including women's words (letters, diaries, poems, and novels), women's images (mostly portraits of elite women), and the writings of men (doctors, lawyers, jurists, newspapermen, and legislators). Klepp's creative thinking about sources leads her to examine sources as varied as real-estate advertisements and women's jokes about male prerogatives. The result is a rich admixture of voices that allows Klepp to explicate how middling women's understanding of conception and family limitation differed from that of other women and men. [End Page 394] Ideas matter to Klepp, and one of the final chapters of Revolutionary Conceptions looks at men in the public order (legislators, judges and juries, and doctors) to learn why men did not object more to women's proactive role in family limitation. Because menstruation, fertility, and childbirth had long been under the purview of women, she explains, men shied away from the topic and were slow to understand the power women were assuming over important family matters. It was not until later in the nineteenth century that they began to pay attention to the changes that women were enacting. When they did, contraception (including abortion) began to take on importance in men's public political and professional debates. The book's subtitle promises a study of "Women, Fertility & Family Limitation in America," but in fact much of the study focuses on white women from the middling ranks in the mid-Atlantic region, especially Pennsylvania. Rich white women who gave birth to large numbers of children in the colonial era continued to do so in the early republic. African American women appear here and there in Klepp's account, more to highlight what was new about the behavior of European-American women than to act in their own stories. Rather than falling, enslaved women's fertility rose throughout the period of study, although following freedom African American women also began to limit family size, albeit at a slower pace than did white women. Klepp is persuasive in arguing that white women from the middle rung of society were rejecting the idea that they should be defined by biology and attaching more importance to childrearing than childbearing. Readers wanting to know about the experiences of other women will need to consult additional literature. Nevertheless, everyone interested in the American revolutionary era, women, and human reproduction will find Revolutionary Conceptions insightful. It includes tables and charts that, among other things, highlight regional and class...

Class, individualisation and tracing processes of inequality in a changing world: a reply to Steven Roberts

This article replies to Steven Roberts' recent critique of my article on the concept of choice biography and how youth studies have engaged with the work of Ulrich Beck. I use this rejoinder to extend my argument about why Beck's ideas matter for youth studies. I suggest that both those who find the concept of choice biography useful and those who critique Beck need to rethink their position. I argue that the model of individualisation built by Beck describes not a reduction of structural constraint but an increase in rules and guidelines shaping young people's lives. However, as these guidelines are partial and contradictory young people must actively manage their biography in a new way. It is not those with the most resources who face the greatest demand to actively shape their biographies but those with the least as they most face the consequences of a proliferation of contradictory and changing rules and guidelines. Beck provides new ways to think about contemporary inequality, but has been under-utilised because he is misread as a continuation of long-running debates in youth sociology.

American Constitutionalism Heard round the World, 1776-1989: A Global Perspective. By George Athan Billias. (New York: New York University Press, 2009. xvi, 544 pp. $60.00, ISBN 978-0-8147-9107-3.)

George Athan Billias's new book makes a powerful case for the importance of American ideas in remaking the world over the past two centuries. Ideas matter, Billias believes, because they inspire. He recaptures how the very existence of a republican United States was a sign of hope for people across Europe and Latin America and, in the twentieth century, the globe. He challenges those who consider all forms of ideational export inherently imperialist, arguing instead that American and other liberal constitutionalisms have greatly enhanced human freedom. Billias limits his definition of American constitutionalism to six founding documents: the Declaration of Independence, the first state constitutions, the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, The Federalist Papers, and the Bill of Rights. Billias pays little heed to those who argue that these documents reflect internal tensions—that they were written as rebuttals to each other. Moreover, by limiting American constitutionalism to the founding era, the book tends toward “original meaning,” ignoring how those documents have been reinterpreted throughout American history as well as abroad. Thus readers miss how transatlantic conversations shaped the emergence of the American welfare state with its emphasis on social rights, and, in turn, how these new constitutional ideas influenced the ideas that Americans exported.

The trouble with drink: why ideas matter

This paper builds upon the work of previous authors who have explored the evolution of ideas in the alcohol arena. With revisions in the relevant sections of ICD and DSM forthcoming, such matters are of considerable contemporary importance. The focus here will be upon the history of the last 200 years. The main themes to be explored include the flux of ideas on what, over time, has counted as the trouble with drink, ideas on the cause of the problem and the impact of this thinking on public action. Medical authorities of the late Enlightenment period made the revolutionary suggestion that habitual drunkenness constituted a disease, rather than a vice. The thread of that idea can be traced to the present day, but with an alternative perception of drink itself or alcohol-related problems generally, as cause for concern, also having a lineage. There are several inferences to be drawn from this history: the need for vigilance lest disease formulations become stalking-horses for moralism and social control, the need to integrate awareness of alcohol dependence as a dimensional individual-level problem, with a public health understanding of the vastly amorphous and at least equally important universe of alcohol-related problems; the dangers lurking in scientific reductionism when the problems at issue truly require a multi-disciplinary analysis; and the need for global consensus rather than cultural imposition of ideas on what counts as the problem with drink.

Systemic pressures and domestic ideas: a neoclassical realist model of grand strategy formation

AbstractScholars in international relations have long known that ideas matter in matters of international politics, yet theories of the discipline have failed to capture their impact either in the making of foreign policy or the nature of the international system. Recent reengagement with the insights of classical realists has pointed to the possibility of a neoclassical realist approach that can take into account the impact of ideas. This article will suggest that the study of grand strategy can enlighten the intervening ideational variables between the distribution of power in the international system and the foreign policy behaviour of states, and thus constitute the key element in a neoclassical realist research agenda.

Accounting for the Benefits of Social Security and the Role of Business: Four Ideal Types and Their Different Heuristics

Germany is considered to be a pioneer of social security systems; nonetheless, globalization and demographic changes have put enormous pressure on them. A solution is not yet in sight as the debate on the future of the German social security systems still lacks consensus. We argue that ideas matter and that the debate can benefit from a deeper reflection on the concept of social security. This objective is pursued along two lines. First, we take a historical perspective and reconstruct the development of Germany’s social security systems. Second, we scrutinize from a theoretical perspective how social security is conceptualized in public and theoretical debates. Behind the various positions, we identify four basic ideal types. We then analyze how these ideal types account for the benefits of social security systems and what role they assign to corporations in providing social security. While two ultimately reinforce potential conflicts between different groups in society, the other two ideal types reveal possible benefits for all. The last ideal type actually conceptualizes social security systems as insurance that fosters risky but overall productive investments in human and other forms of capital. Therefore, it can be shown that social security systems are not necessarily threatened by globalization and that incentives exist for corporations to invest in the provision of social security.

Reply to Daniel Wickberg

Reply to Daniel Wickberg Sarah E. Igo (bio) As I read Daniel Wickberg's thoughtful essay, it was difficult to keep from nodding my head in agreement as he ticked off the present characteristics of my chosen field. The landscape certainly looks familiar. Yes, intellectual history has lost its old pride of place in the larger discipline; yes, the job openings for intellectual historians are alarmingly few and far between; yes, many, especially "internalist," intellectual histories are neglected by our peers; and yes, the very category of intellectual history has become in the last several decades less important—even, I suspect, for many of its practitioners. And yet, my prognosis for the field's health is sunnier than his, for at least three reasons. First, it seems to me that influence, something intellectual historians have in abundance these days, is far more important than the autonomy of our subdiscipline. Second, the state of intellectual history echoes that of many other fields, stemming from what seems to me a largely beneficent reorientation in historical scholarship around topics rather than schools. And third, most of the weaknesses Wickberg identifies in the field of intellectual history are less intellectual than social or structural, and not at all beyond the power of practitioners themselves to remedy. There are other reasons, too, ones that Wickberg's essay nicely points out, including the fact that there are ample audiences, both general and scholarly, for works of intellectual history, as well as excellent histories being written. I should from the outset reveal myself as one of those culprits who calls herself an intellectual and cultural historian, although not simply because I know which side my bread is buttered on. Instead, somewhere along the line in graduate school I found the assumed boundaries of intellectual history somewhat limiting; my own research confounded some historians' definitions of what was properly in that domain. Whether this was a problem with the field or my own early conception of it I'm still not sure, but what I really wanted to do was put the overt, worked-out ideas of specific individuals in conversation with the movements of culture and the common sense of ordinary people. In other words, I was interested in the extent to which formal intellectual production had infiltrated American culture, and in how cultural conventions helped to shape self-conscious intellectuals. In particular, taking seriously the intellectual frameworks laypeople formed and acted upon required an engagement with cultural history and, it seemed, an add-on identity as a cultural historian. (Cultural history in turn seemed insufficiently attentive to the force of ideas and beliefs at work in everyday life, but that's an argument for another day.) That's all to say that I have never been a classic intellectual historian or a purist about the field and in fact have found some of the most compelling recent books in U.S. intellectual history also—and perhaps even primarily—to be works of policy, diplomatic, immigration, or African-American history: Alice O'Connor's Poverty Knowledge (2001), Elizabeth Borgwardt's A New Deal for the World (2005), Mae Ngai's Impossible Subjects (2004), and Nikhil Singh's Black is a Country (2004). Does it matter that their authors may not consider these books first and foremost intellectual history? I don't think so. What counts is that each engages thoroughly and creatively with how ideas matter (here I realize that I treat intellectual history and the history of ideas as more equivalent than some might). Moreover, it is not at all clear to me that this sort of genre blurring makes intellectual history, as Wickberg says, "ancillary to the concerns of the profession at large." Indeed, it suggests less a diluting of intellectual history's identity than a hard-won recognition of the power of ideas to transform diverse arenas of American life—an insight lost in the social history battles of the 1960s and 1970s and whose return we should applaud. As Thomas Bender wrote in 1997, "a field that in the 1970s feared being swept aside by social history now finds itself insinuated into nearly every corner of the discipline."1 This sort of mixing...

Ideational Consensus and U.S. Alliance Management in the Asia-Pacific

This paper examines the role of collective ideas regarding foreign and national security policy - or what I refer to as a “security consensus” - on the direction of U.S. alliance relations and domestic security policy in Asia. I argue that elite ideas and beliefs about the nature of the U.S. alliance in relation to a state’s national security strategy shape or constrain the policy choices made by U.S. alliance partners. To demonstrate that policy choices are more than mere reflections of actors’ preferences or strategic interests, I operationalize the security consensus along the dimensions of breadth and depth. “Breadth” refers to the proportion of elites in the foreign policy and security establishment who support strong alliance ties to the U.S. “Depth” refers to the security consensus embodied in domestic institutions and ideology. Determining the breadth and depth of the security consensus helps us proximate the strength or weakness of the consensus, and the extent to which ideas matter in shaping policy outcomes.

What's Morality Got to Do with It? Benevolent Hegemony in the International System of South Asia

To understand whether ideas matter in international politics and if they can be agents of systemic transformation, one must examine the debate about the “benevolent” hegemony of the United States. Supporters of moral American hegemony claim that the spread of its moral values worldwide will bring about an international transformation. In short, hegemony serves a universal good. A similar claim has been made about the ancient international system of South Asia. The claim here is that the rule of Asoka—the Indian ruler credited with spreading Buddhism and nonviolence to the rest of the world—was committed to the collective good and to the propagation of an ethical code of conduct— dhamma. On this view, Asokan moral hegemony produced a peaceful South Asia. Against this view, this article shows how ideational variables such as dhamma were bound up with material interests to serve the strategic goals of Asokan hegemony in the international system of South Asia. It lends support to the realist conception of the world where strategic deployment of ideational variables and material interests enhance state power, thereby offering the best explanation of seemingly moral behavior.

How Do Ideas Matter?

How do ideas affect political decision making? Despite much evidence that ideas matter, relatively little is known about the specific mechanisms through which they influence actors' beliefs, goals, and preferences. Drawing on psychological findings, the article elaborates a cognitive mechanism through which ideational frameworks shape political elites' preferences among options. It argues that actors' mental models of the domains in which they are operating systematically guide their attention within processes of decision making. By leading them to reason about certain causal possibilities and data and to ignore and discount others, politicians' and policy makers' mental models can powerfully shape their causal belief sets and, in turn, their policy preferences. Furthermore, these attentional effects help explain why ideas persist under some conditions but change under others. The argument is empirically probed through an examination of key episodes in German pension politics over seven decades, drawing on detailed records of high-level policy deliberations.

Students Feed Monkeys for Education: Using the <i>Zhuangzi</i> to Communicate in a Contemporary System of Education

he ideals of creativity and equality are expressed in what the education system pretends to be, not what it is. Creativity in education is the idea that each student is a unique creative individual whose cultivation of his/her “inner self” is fostered by the education system. Equality is said to exist because students are supposed to be marked or graded equally, thereby allowing all students equal opportunity to communicate in education. These ideal values of how education should be are considered good because they allow educators and politicians to develop policies that are supposed to steer the education system closer to them. Furthermore, it is commonly believed that these ideals, though not fully actualized, are to some extent realized in the current system of education in North America. Many students believe that the education system is largely humane, their individual ideas matter, and are judged with some degree of fairness (equality). When students apply to universities (and colleges) they do so believing that they will be considered as persons, equally among other persons. However, the reality of the system of education is far from being either creative or equal. Communication in education that exists today does not reflect the student’s “inner self” nor does the educational system foster genuine equality. In reality, the best way for a student to be accepted into a university is by creating the finest possible application, and to do so students should abandon the ideals of creativity and equality. The aim of this paper is to show that there is a paradoxical disconnection between what the education system and what it pretends to be. This disconnection, when not recognized, can be detrimental to student’s

Constitutional moments in Eastern Europe and subjectivist political economy

This article provides epistemic foundations for traditional rational-choice political science, to explain when and how ideas matter. Operational codes, epistemic communities and the structural patterns of ideas demonstrates the constitutional moments that occur during crises, and how ideas can underpin and direct the formation of interest groups. The implications for policy reform are discussed, along with an application to the Constitutional Moments during the transition of Central and Eastern Europe.

How can the History of Economic thought Contribute to an Understanding of Institutional Change?

Since Moses Abramovitz's “classic” paper on “Catching-Up, Forging Ahead, and Falling Behind” (1986) economists have become increasingly aware again of the significance of “social capability” for processes of economic change. During the past twenty years much research has been done on “soft” determinants of development and growth. Especially some of the so-called new institutionalists and evolutionary economists have now returned to the roots of the institutional research program by acknowledging that “ideas matter” in the process of institutional change. However, it is still often overlooked in the literature that the cognition of social reality is deeply intertwined with the general world-view prevailing in a given society. Certainly, such general world-views are partly determined by the level of economic and technological development, but they are also a reflection of deeply rooted cultural traditions. In particular, the highly divergent outcomes of economic and political transition in the formerly socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe have brought the connection between culture, ideas, and institutions to the fore again (see, for example, Winiecki 2004). Therefore it is all but an accident that it is one of the leading transition experts who has recently called on economists to “seek a better understanding of the role of values and norms in shaping both ideas and institutions” (Roland 2004, p. 128).

Waltzing with a Monster: Bringing Research to Bear on Public Policy

Social scientists who want their research to influence social policy would do well to work with executive branch agencies, especially at state and local levels. Agency administrators are ready to use social science theories and evidence if the social science is brought to them. The article offers six principles for work with administrative agencies: (1) individual leaders matter, (2) timing matters, (3) ideas matter, (4) costs, and who bears the costs matter, (5) government is not monolithic, and (6) one cannot control the uses to which data are put. Working with government, like waltzing with a monster, is not unproblematic, but attending to these principles can help avoid some bruised toes.

The Conception of Wealth among the Merchants in Late Imperial China

This article reassesses Weber's position on the influence of Confucianism on China's failure to develop the modern form of capitalism by focusing on the conception of wealth among the merchants in the Ming and Qing dynasties. It starts with a review of the criticisms directed towards Weber's theses, including his claim about an affinity between Calvinism and the spirit of capitalism, and his assertion about the lack of moral tensions in Confucianism. We argue that despite the flaws in his analyses, Weber's position that ideas matter is still relevant. The main shortcoming of his argument about the link between the Confucian value system and the failure of China to develop a modern form of capitalism is that he overlooked a critical element in this value system. This was the idea, widely shared among the merchants in late imperial China, of the desirability of disposing of one's wealth. This had the effect of discouraging the accumulation of capital in a period of incipent capitalism. While this idea was intrinsic to the Confucian intellectual tradition, it was also reinforced by the vulnerable position of the merchants under the omnipotent structure of state political power during the Ming dynasty. This shows that while ideas were crucial in preventing China from developing modern capitalism, they did not operate in isolation from the socio-political context as a historical force.