The differing trajectory of agricultural policy reforms in the 1990s in the world's two most important agricultural powers, the United States and the European Community/Union (EC/EU), can only be fully understood by appreciating the role that ideas play in policy outcomes. The idea of agricultural exceptionalism underwrote a paradigm of state assistance in the US and the EC/EU. By the mid-1980s, the state assistance paradigm was under stress, and subject to a number of anomalies in both the US and the EC. But while the paradigm was overthrown and replaced with a market liberal model in the US grain sector in the 1990s, it remained intact in the European Union. Explaining why agricultural exceptionalism and the state assistance paradigm has endured in the EU while it has withered in the US highlights three factors: the importance of the political institutional framework in locking in-or not-policy principles and instruments; the degree of fit of a sectoral policy paradigm with the broader societal ideational framework regarding appropriate relations between the state, the market, and the individual; and the capacity of a paradigm to adjust in the face of challenges and anomalies.

This article presents an alternative trajectory to policy paradigm change to that outlined by Peter A. Hall's social learning model, in which unsuccessful efforts by state officials to respond to policy failures and anomalies in the existing paradigm eventually trigger a broader, societal, political partisan debate about policy principles. From this society-wide contestation over policy goals, problems, and solutions, a new policy paradigm emerges. Drawing on the conceptual tools of policy feedback and policy networks, this article describes an alternative route to paradigm shift in which change is negotiated between state actors and group representatives. Discussions of change are largely confined to sectoral policy networks and the result is a more managed series of policy changes that culminate in a paradigm shift. This argument for a second, cumulative trajectory to paradigm shift is developed by examining agricultural policy change in three countries: the United States, Canada, and Australia.

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This article examines the contemporary basis of legitimate governance in Canada by identifying and documenting four different bases of political authority: state-centred, market-based, expert and popular authority. The co-existence of these competing bases of authority, traced to cultural shifts and developments associated with globalization, creates conflicting domestic and international norms of procedural and substantive legitimacy. The article argues that effective and legitimate governing in Canada requires greater incorporation of elements of popular authority, and reform, not abandonment, of state-centred authority.

"Tracing developments over the past two decades with respect to Canadian farm income support, orderly grain marketing, and supply management, this article argues that Canadian agricultural policy has undergone programmatic, but not paradigmatic policy change. International trade agreements, alongside domestic factors like budgetary pressures, have helped to promote programmatic change. However, paradigmatic change in the form of a rejection of the core ideas and instruments of the post Second World War state assistance paradigm has not yet occurred. The article discusses the conditions for paradigmatic change and argues that the state assistance paradigm is likely to prevail until influential decision makers becoming convinced of its failure and judge an alternate paradigm to be politically and economically viable." Copyright (c) 2008 Canadian Agricultural Economics Society.