This article explores how political ideas shape policymaking beyond their technical merit. It examines why some ideas gain influence, how problem definitions evolve, and how shifts in perception drive policy change. Through comparative perspectives and key theorists, it highlights how politics, institutions, and framing determine which ideas succeed or fade in shaping agendas and outcomes.
Studying Ideas as Policy Solutions: Next Steps
Work to date has done an admirable job in discrediting the native technocratic of functional view that ideas that are adopted by policy makers are chosen simply because of their ability to solve a policy problem. But while this literature has enlarged the stable of theories about which policy ideas are selected and why, this phase of theory generation is only the first step in understanding how policy ideas matter in politics.
One obvious next step is to try to develop some generalizations about how the processes by which ideas are chosen vary across issues, time, and space. In terms of variance across issues, one might expect that issues that were highly visible, such as schooling or welfare reform, would be more likely to be publicly championed (as with airline deregulation) than ideas that were highly technical or not immediately relevant to the public.
In terms of change over time, some have argued for a general trend away from iron triangles and toward more inclusive networks of actors (Heclo 1978); integrating more contemporary work in this vein into the literature on ideas and politics would be helpful.
Finally, research suggests differences in how national traditions or past collective experiences affect the way nations interpret diffusing ideas (Katzenstein 1996a). Cross-national differences are also likely to exist in how and where expertise is produced, what kinds of expertise is produced, and the relationship between these producers and government (Beland 2005, 8 9).
Schmidt (2001) provides evidence that differences in the configuration of political institutions can produce different structures of discourse, ranging from broadly inclusive to largely delimited to key policy makers. National differences in how expertise is processed and incorporated (Campbell and Pedersen, chapter 8 in this book) should become part of more refined ideational theories.
Methodologically, one central weakness of the literature is the massive selection bias toward ideas that ultimately become policy. The consequence is that the literature has been limited to identifying necessary factors (such as Hall’s three factors model or Kingdon’s three streams), but without equivalent negative cases, there is no way to delineate sufficient factors (Harding, Fox, and Mehta 2002).
This is not simply an academic issue; an absence of negative cases can also mean an inattention to the second and third faces of power (Bachrach and Baratz 1962; Lukes 1974), because the analysis is limited to what actually appears on the agenda. This is not a problem that should be intractable; future studies could identify a range of plausible possibilities at a given point in time and then seek to isolate the reasons some ideas were more successful than others or, over a longer period of time, try to understand why some options remained on the table and others were excluded.
Much work also remains to be done in specifying the processes by which some ideas come to be favored over time. One way to see this is as a two-stage process: in the first stage, an old idea comes to be discredited, and in the second stage, a particular new idea comes to be favored (Blyth 2002; Legro 2000; McNamara 1998). Thus far, there has been much more attention to the latter than to the former.
To put it another way, Kingdon’s question of what makes an idea’s time come has now been quite thoroughly examined; the complementary question of when an idea’s time is up has received comparatively much less attention. One could imagine that this could happen through an exogenous external event that called the previous consensus into question. Another possibility is that an idea’s time could lapse more gradually, as advocates manipulated indicators, symbols, and ordinary news events to create the political space for a new idea (Campbell 1998).
Kingdon talks about the process of “softening up” or paving the road for a new idea; there likely often needs to be a slow and steady “wearing down” of the old idea. At the same time, those who are proponents of the idea will actively try to rebuff such efforts and ward off any attempt at agenda and policy change (Cobb and Ross 1997).
Even once a void has been created, the process by which another solution comes to the fore needs to be further investigated. While concepts such as policy feedback have drawn our attention to how these processes play out overtime, they do not specify which lessons policy makers will draw from previous experiences, sure always to be a heavily contested process (Beland 2005).
For every story about power politics and legislative conflict, there is a back story that explains which ideas came to acquire the prominence, legitimacy, ang backers that they did. It is these periods that are largely out of sight from the point of view of legislative conflicts that should command our attention if we are interested in how the agenda is shaped over time.
At the same time, seeing this as a process with definitive stages failure of an old idea followed by a period of uncertainty and then consolidation of a new one (Legro 2000; Blyth 2002; McNamara 1998)—has its own limitations as a way to understand the rise of new ideas. In many cases, what happens is not the collapse of an older policy but, rather, simply the rise of a new set of considerations that make a different set of policies appropriate for approaching the issue area. Baumgartner and Jones (1993) illustrate this process repeatedly, showing, for example, how nuclear power shifted from an economic issue to one of health and safety, resulting in a much different policy regime. While Legro (2000) theorizes that it is the unfulfilled expectations of a policy that provide the opportunity for change, it also can be the sense that the expectations themselves change as the problem comes to have a different definition.
This brings us to the greatest limitation of the literature on programmatic policy ideas, namely, that it takes the problems for which these ideas serve as “solutions” for granted. How problems are defined has a substantial impact on which alternatives are chosen (Rein and Schon 1977), and so to ignore problem definition is to miss much of the debate.
Kingdon does have a theory of problem definition policy entrepreneurs redefine problems so as to meet their prearrived solutions but he gives less consideration to the other ways that the problem-definition “stream” might be shaped by politicians, advocates, social movements, and media elites, much of the time in the absence of actual policy solutions.
Ideas as Problem Definitions:
The way in which political problems are defined is its own field (Rochefort and Cobb 1994), one that has generated a diverse set of case studies but not much in the way of theoretical development. Scholars of problem definition reject the idea that political choices are simply the sum of individual, interest group or institutional preferences and instead offer a model of politics in which actors are fighting over how a policy problem or collective purpose should be defined (Reich 1988; Mansbridge 1994; Stone 1988; Rein and Winship 1999). In comparison with many of the models discussed in the section on ideas as policy solutions above, those interested in problem definition see actors (at least some of the time) less as strategic wielders of ideas and more as possessors of taken for granted assumptions (Berger and Luckimann 1966) that influence the types of problem definitions and solutions that they favor (Schon and Rein 1994).
Separating out the battle over problem definition from the battle over policy solutions is a critical step in understanding policy development. The distinction between problems and solutions should be familiar given the prominence of Kingdon’s early work, but it is too often ignored in practice as scholars conflate policy paradigms or problem definitions with actual policy choices, as in much of the work on Keynesianism (Beland 2005).
Problem definitions define the scope of potential possible choices, but within a given problem definition, there are still often multiple choices for policy. For example, in my work on education, I argue that standards-based reform, public school choice, vouchers, and charter schools all fit within an educational problem definition that emphasizes improvement on test scores and school accountability (Mekta 2006). At the same time, the battle over problem definition is critical for understanding agenda setting, because once a problem definition becomes dominant, it excludes policies that are not consistent with its way of describing the issue.
There are three definitional issues that I should mention upfront, in order to situate this discussion in the existing literature.
First, problem definitions are at the same analytical level as what Peter Hall calls “paradigms,” in that they describe “not only the goals of policy…but also the very nature of the problems they are meant to be addressing” (1993, 279). I prefer to use the term problem definition in this context, however, because while paradigms tend to evoke the notion of a single dominant idea that governs an area, problem definitions evoke the fluid nature of constantly competing ideas that highlight different aspects of a given situation.
Second, the process of defining problems is different from framing as the latter term has been used in the literature. A problem definition is similar to a frame in that it bounds a complicated situation by emphasizing some elements to the neglect of others, but framing has been mostly employed as a term to describe how to package a preexisting set of ideas to win more adherents to one’s position (Beland 2005; Campbell 1998). Consistent with this usage, framing is one element in a broader battle over problem definition.
Third, while some scholars have insisted on the analytic separation of normative and empirical or causal ideas (Campbell 1998; Goldstein and Keohane 1993),’ I follow Putnam (2002) in arguing against the fact/value dichotomy. Problem definitions generally evoke both normative and empirical descriptions in ways that are usually mutually reinforcing.
Key questions for understanding problem definition are
- How political problems get defined and
- Why one problem definition prevails over another in a particular dispute.
Since there is no grand theoretical synthesis that answers these questions (Rochefort and Cobb 1994), I draw eclectically from literature in the construction of social problems, problem definition, and agenda change.