How Do Ideas Matter?

Abstract

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.

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