This article examines the transformation of the Swedish model of economic regulation from an ideational perspective. While the majority of arguments about the decline of the Swedish model have focused on the role of structural factors, this article looks to illuminate the ideational factors that made possible both the emergence and the transformation of the Swedish model. The article details how, during the 1930s and 1940s, economic ideas provided the Swedish state and its trade union allies with the means to construct the institutions of the Swedish model. By the 1970s, however, Swedish business suffered diminishing returns to continued participation within these institutions and responded to labor's challenges by adopting a two-pronged strategy of withdrawal from and ideological contestation of labor's supporting institutions. The politics of ideas was key in this regard. During the 1980s Swedish business marshaled alternative economic ideas to contest and thus delegitimate existing institutions and the patterns of distribution they made possible. Swedish business thus began the process of overturning the Swedish model long before capital mobility or domestic inflation was ever a problem. By highlighting these factors, the article offers an explanation of the transformation of the Swedish model that stresses the centrality of ideational contestation for understanding institutional change in general.
This article questions the centrality of interest-based explanation in political science. Through an examination of the “turn to ideas” undertaken in the past decade by rationalist and nonrationalist scholars in both comparative politics and international relations, it seeks to make three points. First, interests are far from the unproblematic and ever-ready explanatory instruments we assume them to be. Second, the ideational turn of historical institutionalism and constructivist international relations theory marks a substantive theoretical shift in the field precisely because it problematizes notions of action that take interest as given. Third, such scholarship emerged from, and in reaction to, the inherent limits of rationalist treatments of interests and ideas. That it did so suggests that progress in the discipline may be more dialectic—rather than linear or paradigmatic—than we realize.
This book picks up where Karl Polanyi's study of economic and political change left off. Building upon Polanyi's conception of the double movement, Blyth analyzes the two periods of deep seated institutional change that characterized the twentieth century: the 1930s and the 1970s. Blyth views both sets of changes as part of the same dynamic. In the 1930s labor reacted against the exigencies of the market and demanded state action to mitigate the market's effects by 'embedding liberalism.' In the 1970s, those who benefited least from such 'embedding' institutions, namely business, reacted against these constraints and sought to overturn that institutional order. Blyth demonstrates the critical role economic ideas played in making institutional change possible. Great Transformations rethinks the relationship between uncertainty, ideas, and interests, achieving profound new insights on how, and under what conditions, institutional change takes place.
This article argues that there is a paradox at the heart of Hall's "Policy Paradigms" framework stemming from the desire to see both state and society as generative of social learning while employing two different logics to explain how such learning takes place: what I term the "Bayesian" and "constructivist" versions of the policy paradigms causal story. This creates a paradox as both logics cannot be simultaneously true. However, it is a generative paradox insofar as the power of the policy paradigms framework emerges, in part, from this attempt to straddle these distinct positions, producing an argument that is greater than the sum of its parts. In the second part of the article, I discuss the recent global financial crisis, an area where we should see third-order change, but we do no not. That we do not strengthens the case for the constructivist causal story.
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