The recent ideational turn in political science and public administration implies that ideas matter. Ideas are an essential explanatory concept for understanding policy changes and decisionmaking processes. The aim of the paper is to specify how ideas matter as a variable in public policy research, providing students and scholars of public policy with a stock take of the current state-of-the-art literature on ideas in political science and public administration. The paper first identifies three approaches to ideas as a variable in the policy process. It then discusses where ideas come from and the dynamics and drivers of ideational change to shed light on the ideational mechanisms underpinning policy processes. Furthermore, it taps into different research methods that can be used to study ideas. Finally, the paper concludes with five lessons for future research endeavours on the study of ideas in public policy.

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Leadership studies research reveals that political leaders' beliefs affect their political and policymaking behaviour, especially in times of crisis. Moreover, the level of flexibility of these beliefs influences the likelihood that groups of leaders come to collective decisions. Insight into when and why political leaders do, in fact, change their beliefs is sorely lacking. This paper uses fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to examine the antecedents of belief changes among 12 European leaders, all working in the realm of economic policy. Its findings reveal how increases in unemployment and unsustainable debt, as well as different government ideologies and increases in Euroscepticism lead to economic belief changes. In so doing, this paper begins to open the 'black box' of when, why, and under what conditions leaders change their beliefs. KEYWORDS Beliefs; Eurozone; crisis; European Council; political leadership; QCA Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds, cannot change anything. (Shaw 1944: 330) Political leaders, like all of us, are sense-making machines. When faced with a situation that threatens the status quo, political leaders turn to their personal beliefs to make the threat more 'explicable, manageable and actionable' (Blyth 2002: 10). In times of crisis, in particular, political leaders' beliefs inform and shape their policymaking (Cuhadar et al. 2017; Dyson 2018; Kaarbo 2018; Van Esch and Swinkels 2015). At the same time, these beliefs are themselves susceptible to influence from the dynamics of political and economic contexts, a leader's traits, the political CONTACT Marij Swinkels

Migrant integration policies in the Netherlands have become increasingly restrictive over the past two decades. This development has been prompted chiefly by the strong politicization of the subject of integration and, as a consequence, a growing political interference with policymaking. Policy design and construction is predominantly carried out by policy officials in state bureaucracies. Some of these actors, however, have great difficulties with the restrictive turn in integration policies and the associated political discourse. Policy officials use the concept of professionalism to describe how they cope with the ambiguity between their personal convictions and the professional role they are expected to play. Thus, professionalism symbolizes cultural orientations, norms and values that are important in the bureaucratic organization. In this paper, we argue that the discourse of professionalism functions as a disciplinary logic that controls policy officials, but that simultaneously endows their work with meaning and creates a feeling of belonging. ARTICLE HISTORY

This chapter discusses the leadership style of Dutch prime ministers (PMs) and asks the question what type of leadership skills, relations, and reputations are most effective in modern Dutch politics: a consensual or confrontational style. While Dutch politics traditionally favors leaders who employ a consensus-oriented leadership style, prime ministers Balkenende (2002–2010) and Rutte (2010–present) served at a time when socio-cultural changes and mediatization of politics were challenging this political practice. By applying a modified version of the Leadership Capital Index (LCI), the chapter shows that to ensure re-election, both PMs struck a careful balance between the consensual and confrontational leadership styles. Whereas the study indicates that prime ministers have considerable leeway in how to strike that balance, the results suggest that it is essential that they maintain constructive relations with their peers in government and parliament to be electorally successful in the Dutch political system.