Ideas and power: four intersections and how to show them

Abstract

The notion that ideas powerfully shape policies seems highly intuitive. How actors think about policy matters, and their thinking is not just a mechanistic function of uninterpreted conditions around them. Yet turning this intuition into clear claims about the influence of ideas is challenging. This contribution extracts guidelines from the growing literature on ideas to suggest how to best display four common kinds of intersections between ideas and context that make the ideas powerful. We can show that certain ideas gain influence because ‘believers’ obtain power for unrelated reasons; because the ideas somehow empower actors to achieve power; because they make possible new coalitions of actors; or because they inform the crafting or retooling of institutions that matter. The essay highlights what some of the strongest literature on ideas does well and how it can become still more persuasive.

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