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Journal of European Public Policy

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The New Ideas Scholarship in the Mirror of Historical Institutionalism: A Case of Old Whines in New Bottles?

Mark Blyth

To cite this article: Mark Blyth (2016) The New Ideas Scholarship in the Mirror of Historical Institutionalism: A Case of Old Whines in New Bottles?, Journal of European Public Policy, 23:3, 464-471, DOI: 10.1080/13501763.2015.1118292

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2015.1118292

Published online: 15 Dec 2015.

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Commentary

THE NEW IDEAS SCHOLARSHIP IN THE MIRROR OF HISTORICAL INSTITUTIONALISM: A CASE OF OLD WHINES IN NEW BOTTLES? Mark Blyth

INTRODUCTION

Scholars interested in the interaction of ideas, power and public policy fired their first salvoes over 30 years ago. Deborah Stone’s ‘Causal stories and the for- mation of policy agendas’ (1989) and Peter Hall’s ‘The power of economic ideas’ (1989) blazed the trail. Then came a flood of work from around 1993 to 2003 by scholars such as Hall (1993), Berman (1998), McNamara (1999), Schmidt (2002) and Blyth (2002) that pushed the politics of ideas into the mainstream of political science. This edited collection represents a third wave of ideas scholarship that seeks to go beyond the proposition that ideas matter, to showing how they matter for one very important concept: power. In this regard, this collection suggests an evolution of the ideational research program similar to that already taken by historical institutionalist (HI) scholars over the past decade. As such, making a comparison between the ‘research arcs’ taken by these two bodies of work may be worthwhile.

Beginning with HI, Paul Pierson (2004) noted that HI scholars had spent a lot of time thinking about the institutional part of what they were doing rather than the historical part. His argument was that to get away from institutions as being forever constraining of action, and to get over the need for exogenous punctuations to promote change, one had to bring temporality back into HI scholarship to disrupt paths and create new causal possibilities. HI scholarship spent the next 10 years trying to do just that.

The new wave of ideational scholarship showcased here faces a similar chal- lenge. Scholars of ‘the power of ideas’ have spent a lot of time fleshing out the ‘ideas’ part of that phrase, but have not spent as much time thinking about what power is, and does, in this research program. This collection, in different ways, aims to remedy that deficit. This is, of course, a task that goes beyond any single collection, and the contributions assembled here give us,

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Journal of European Public Policy, 2016

Vol. 23, No. 3, 464 – 471, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2015.1118292

especially in the cases of Carstensen and Schmidt (2015) and Widmaier (2015), new leverage on this issue through their triptych of power ‘in, over and through’ ideas. Other contributions in this collection open up new agendas for ideational research, particularly with the use of mapping technologies, which enable researchers to examine the spread of ideas empirically to a degree unimaginable just 10 years ago. In this regard Seabrooke and Wigan (2015) highlight the role played by professions as idea carriers, while Helgadóttir (2015) attunes us to the circulation of élites in economics as an important part of the ‘plumbing’ of ideas. All of this is welcome, but I wonder if one part of this new scholarship, that highlighted in the contributions of Carstensen and Schmidt and Widmaier, is in danger of following the same path as HI scholars, a path that ultimately led to the weakening of their research program.

LEARNING FROM HI’S ‘OLD WHINES IN NEW BOTTLES’ PROBLEM

Let’s focus again on HI’s struggle with being ‘too open at the front end and too closed at the back end’, – aka the problem of endogenous change. Pierson’s (2004) solution was to bring temporality back in by embracing an historical notion of causation, where cause A at T1 causes effect B at T2, but effect B now becomes cause C, which makes what can happen in the next state space ever more contingent as one moves forward. In short, historical causes mean that causes that occur at T1 change the system such that they cannot be causal in the same way at T2. This is logically correct, but seriously embracing such a causal model makes the path forward almost too contingent as opposed to too path dependent. It makes the system one of Markov chains, where the past state of the system has no bearing on its present condition. Indeed, making that move makes history reversible, and thus its causal importance dis- appears. Paradoxically, then, the desire to bring history back in as temporality risked making history redundant.

Perhaps recognizing the difficulties this move engendered, later HI work such as Streeck and Thelen (2005) – as discussed by Widmaier (2015) in this collec- tion – and Mahoney and Thelen (2010) moved away from ‘bringing time back in’, in two steps. First, by putting this ‘old whine’ about the need to endogenize change in ‘new bottles’; that is, grouping change into categories called ‘drift’, ‘layering’, ‘conversion’ and ‘displacement’ (Streeck and Thelen 2005). Second, having done so, and recognizing that something other than the insti- tution itself must be doing this ‘layering’ etc., an appeal to agency appeared in this literature such that its ‘change agents’ rather than institutions that do the heavy lifting (Mahoney and Thelen 2010). As a consequence of this shift in focus, what begins as a strong theory of institutions that tries to endogenize change ends up as a weak theory of agency and coalitions that change insti- tutions, as long as there is enough uncertainty, ambiguity or power for agents to do so.

M. Blyth: The new ideas scholarship in the mirror of historical institutionalism 465

In sum, for HI the ‘old whine’ was endogenous change in a system that for- mally eschewed ideas as a source of change. HI’s ‘new bottles’ were exercises in the categorization of change, categories that were in turn explained by agents’ desires for change. But where those desires came from, if it was not owing to an exogenous shock, remained a mystery.

1 Embracing ideas would have been

the obvious solution to this problem. Indeed, the fact that recent HI work infor- mally rests upon agents ‘reinterpreting’ what institutions are for (Hall and Thelen 2009; Mahoney and Thelen 2010) strongly suggests a large ideational elephant being smuggled into HI’s materialist tent to solve this problem (Blyth et al., 2016). But formally, HI has weakened itself. The pursuit of an all-encompassing theory of endogenous change, an old whine, has resulted in a strong theory of institutions becoming a derivative theory of agents and coalitions formed under environmental uncertainty and rule ambiguity. For those with a sense of irony and disciplinary memory, Peter Gourevitch (1986) just ate HI for lunch.

So here is my caution as I review what I see as the key contributions to this collection. This new ideational scholarship, if it’s not careful, might be about to construct the same self-limiting loop. Especially in the contributions of Cart- stensen and Schmidt (2015) and Widmaier (2015), by focusing so much on power, in much the same way that HI scholars problematized endogenous change, they risk re-creating an ‘old whine’ – how best to conceptualize power – and seek to resolve it by sticking it in a series of self-limiting bottles – power ‘in, over and through’ ideas. Unfortunately, because ‘how best to con- ceptualize power’ is, like how to endogenize all forms of change, an unanswer- able question, and going down this path risks generating, like HI, problems that any set of ‘new bottles’ cannot contain. The other path taken in this collection, that of mapping flows of ideas and agents, suggests that not trying to do this can also be very productive.

POWER AS AN ‘OLD WHINE’ FOR IDEAS SCHOLARS

The central problem with conceptualizing power is that if, for example, one starts with an agent-based view of power, one ends up with a structural account of agency, and vice versa, thus creating a hermeneutic loop. Conse- quently, the version of ‘what power is’ that a scholar picks delimits the work that power can perform in their ideational analysis, which creates a circularity similar to that seen in HI’s attempt to deal with its own ‘old whine’ of endogen- ous change.

For example, if one begins with a Dahlian notion of behavioral power (1957), as Lukes (1974) notes, this misses agenda-setting and hegemonic power, which is rather obviously related to ideas, and yet is far more structural. But if one embraces, for example, a structural concept such as hegemonic power, one immediately runs into problems of how agents can know what the world really looks like such that one can escape the hegemony and call it as such. But if agents can do that, why is the hegemony so powerful? The answer is,

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usually, because powerful people run the hegemony while those who can see through it have a correspondence theory of history. But that simply reduces ideas to structures rather completely, and, as Carstensen and Schmidt (2015) note in this collection, such a conception of power is rather useless for people who want to talk, as they do, about ‘ideational power’ and agency.

A partial solution that Carstensen and Schmidt (2015) seem fond of is a qua- lified embrace of Foucault (1980, 2000). This can be useful when handled with care, but it’s not without its own limitations. Foucault’s key move was to make agency a product of discourse where agents’ subject positions (identities) are constituted by the discursive field in which they are embedded. But this position is no friendlier to ideas than structural notions of hegemony, because if agents are ‘all products and no producer,’ why does change ever happen and who could ever have new ideas? Foucault’s attempt to address this agency problem via the concept of the ‘technologies of the self’ is similar to HI’s move of bringing ‘change agents’ back in: theoretically necessary, but necessarily ad hoc. Ulti- mately, embracing Foucualt’s theory of power risks reducing ideas to discourse, which some may be willing to do, and do most productively (Epstein 2010), but for others (Parsons in Abdelal et al. 2010)2 such a move may be a bridge too far. In any event, the main point I wish to stress here is that the embrace of any single version of power necessarily delimits the role played by ideas in their analysis.

But putting this ‘old whine’ in a new bottle or two is tempting, and there are indeed many ‘new bottles’ on offer. Carstensen and Schmidt (2015) highlight the Bourdiesian move towards the study of ‘practices’ as a possible new bottle. Another possible new bottle that they do not mention is the literature on performativity (MacKenzie 2006). But attractive as these new bottles are, once everything becomes a performance of theory, or a replication of practice, agents become little more than the carriers of ideas that are themselves structural despite, once again, the claim to agency. For example, as I write this contri- bution I am indeed performing the role of a university scholar, thereby (in part) replicating via my work practices the structures of late capitalism. But what good does it do us to re-describe the world that way? Performance and practice seem to evacuate power, with agents practicing something, or perform- ing what the theory compels them to do, which would rather undermine the point of ‘ideational power’. Carstensen and Schmidt’s preferred ‘new bottle’ is power ‘in, over and through’ ideas, which, I suggest, performs the same func- tion as HI’s concepts of layering, conversation, etc.; that is, they take an ‘old whine’, in this case power, and attempt to deal with it via categorization. But what if, like HI, doing so weakens the ideas research program by narrowing the focus such that it misses as much as it illuminates?

NEW BOTTLES FOR IDEATIONAL POWER

Carstensen and Schmidt’s ambition is to give ideational analysis its own theory of power, defined as ‘the capacity of actors . . . to influence actors’

M. Blyth: The new ideas scholarship in the mirror of historical institutionalism 467

normative and cognitive beliefs through the use of ideational elements’ (2015). Power thus conceived is then categorized in three ways: as power through ideas (power by persuasion); as power over ideas (power by ideational veto and/or as weapons of the weak); and power in ideas (the ‘taken for granted’ assumptions that structure how the former two processes play out). Their contribution is primarily theoretical, so the question becomes what’s the payoff empirically? This is where Widmaier’s (2015) article comes in to good effect.

Widmaier (2015) deploys Carstensen and Schmidt’s (2015) framework as sequential mechanisms that destabilize institutional orders. He posits three recalibrations of ideational power that sit alongside each of Carstensen and Schmidt’s categories. First, power in ideas is operationalized as rhetorical power, which leaders use to construct orders. Second, power over ideas is oper- ationalized as epistemic power, which is generated when power is delegated to a technocracy. Third, power over ideas is operationalized as structural power, where ideas set boundaries on what can be known, or even thought about as appropriate, thereby building fragility and thus the possibility of change into the model. Critical here is Widmaier’s insight that the veto function implied in power through ideas can lead to a narrowness of vision among an established policy élite that can, in turn, lead to fragility and crisis. His case study of the construction and crisis of neoliberalism in the United States and the United Kingdom shows the payoff to thinking this way. Yet, what he suggests about power through ideas as a ‘narrowness of vision’ might also apply to ideational scholarship itself if other researchers adopted the same framework. The ‘in’, ‘over’ and ‘through’ triptych is appealing and powerful. But its adoption wholesale as a ‘new way’ of doing ideational scholarship may be costly.

For example, Matthijs’s discussion of how deeply entrenched German econ- omic ideas generated a self-defeating policy path is a powerful demonstration of the power of ideas to defeat self-interest. As he puts it bluntly, ‘Germany’s ideas did not just lead to suboptimal outcomes from Berlin’s interest point of view; they actually caused the crisis by making it a systemic one’(Matthijs 2015; emphasis original). Matthijs’s main explanatory engines are the concepts of ‘self-fulfilling’ and ‘self-denying’ prophecies rather than power ‘in’, ‘over’ and through’ ideas, and he uses them to good effect. Had Matthijs adopted the in’, ‘over’ and through’ framework to explain his case, it probably would have worked, but it would have illuminated a different set of causal processes at work than those currently on display in his contribution. Indeed, while concepts of self-ful- filling and self-defeating prophecies most certainly speak to the power of ideas, it’s hard to square these concepts with the prerequisites of power ‘in, over and through’ ideas.

It is also not clear what adding the framework to Helgadóttir’s (2015) analysis of Bocconi economists would bring to the table. How would the fluidity of net- works of expertise and the local ecologies of policy-making be clarified by adding ‘in, over and through’ to the analysis? To be clear, Carstensen and

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Schmidt (2015) are not advocating that everyone should use this framework, even in this edited collection. But it is a seductive technology and I am sure that it will be adopted by other scholars. As such, we need to consider what is gained by embracing such an approach to power and what is lost.

A contrast with Seabrooke and Wigan (2015) and Helgadóttir’s (2015) con- tributions is useful here. These scholars detail how ideas are powered through expertise, which is demonstrated through a network mapping of their cases. Seabrooke and Wigan’s case study of the battle over country-by-country reporting in corporate tax affairs, and the move by the EU to establish a common corporate tax base, are clearly deep ideational struggles infused with moral imperatives. Seabrooke and Wigan clarify, by mapping these debates, how attending to expert networks and moral claim making can explain otherwise puzzling phenomena. Similarly, Helgadottir’s excellent mapping of Bocconi-trained economists and their ideas hinges upon notions of linked ecologies and shared ideas that become powerful because the actors holding such ideas occupy key sites in the network of global economic knowl- edge. In both of these cases power is centrality in a network, not power ‘in’, ‘over’ or ‘through’ ideas. Their very different conceptualization of power allows these scholars to research ‘the power of ideas’ in a very different, and yet equally productive, way. While not without its own weaknesses as a measure of power, network centrality and related concepts do show us how power is a plural and complex concept that becomes fragile if we take only one view on it.

CONCLUSION

Frameworks can be useful, but they can also be limiting. Old whines are old whines for a reason. They are usually, at base, irresolvable problems. In the case of HI, the desire to build a general theory of endogenous change produced a set of categories into which politics was poured, with the result that a theory of institutions became a theory of agency, coalitions and, occasionally, ideas. Power is a classic case of an old whine, for the reasons given above. As such, pushing ideational analysis into a specific set of power categories comes at a cost. The ‘in, over and through’ framework developed here by Carstensen and Schmidt (2015) is a useful compliment to how scholars can conceptualize the relationship between ideas and power. But since that there is no single work- able theory of power, why should there be a single workable theory of ‘ideational power’? Rather, if power is plural in form, as is shown by the majority of the contributions in this collection, especially those that focus on networks, then ideas perhaps scholarship should be too?

Biographical note: Mark Blyth is Eastman Professor of Political Economy at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.

M. Blyth: The new ideas scholarship in the mirror of historical institutionalism 469

Address for correspondence: Professor Mark Blyth, Brown University, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street, Box 1970, Providence, RI USA, 02912- 1970.

NOTES

1 As Widmaier (2015) puts it regarding such work in HI, ‘such assumptions obscure the need for agents to interpret material incentives before they react to them’.

2 And Parsons (2015).

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