How ideas matter in public policy: a review of concepts, mechanisms, and methods

Swinkels, Marij

doi:10.4000/irpp.1343

Cited by 63 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 108 publications

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“…This area of studies originated from King (1973) and got a new impulse in the 1990s after Hall's pioneering studies (1989;. For the last few decades, this research has expanded signi cantly and now involves various social scientists, including institutionalists, constructivists, and rational choice scholars (Berman 2013;Hogan and Howlett 2015;Swinkels 2020). This eld examines how policy ideas are institutionalized and turn into policy instruments.…”

Section: Methodological Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does resource abundance require special approaches to climate policies? The case of Russia

Макаров

2022

Climatic Change

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As the world's largest fossil fuels exporter, Russia is one of the key countries for addressing global climate change. However, it has never demonstrated any signi cant ambitions to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This paper applies ideational research methodology to identify the structural differences in economic, political, and social normative contexts between industrialized fossil fuel importing economies and Russia that lead to the fundamental gap in motivations driving decarbonization efforts. Consequently, Russia is unlikely to replicate the approach to the green transition and use instruments of climate policies which are utilized in energy-importing countries. In order to launch decarbonization in Russia, interested stakeholders need to frame climate policies in Russia differently. Speci cally, the framing must address the priority of diversi cation as a means to adapting the national economy to a new green landscape, the combination of diverse channels for decarbonization, the promotion of energy-e ciency, closer attention to climate-related forest projects and linkage of climate change with other environmental problems. Moreover, considering Russia's emissions as a part of the global economic system and shifting from a simplistic national focus on GHG emissions reduction would help coordinate policies through dialogue between exporters and importers of fossil fuels energy-intensive goods, which is essential for the global movement towards a net-zero future.

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Section: Methodological Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does resource abundance require special approaches to climate policies? The case of Russia

Макаров

2022

Climatic Change

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“…Furthermore, ideas about specific types of investment like CSLI are not easy to distinguish methodologically from related and more general ideas about foreign investment or the general 'investment climate' of an economy (see Linsi, 2020). We hence approach this interaction and co-constitution of material and ideational factors methodologically by integrating different methodological elements of ideational studies (Swinkels, 2020): By triangulating the textual data we gather from policy documents, newspapers, and reports with expert interviews, we ensure to adequately capture the nuances of these ideational changes. Our dependent variable -the changing investment regimes -adds further leverage to the argument, since these 'material' changes require a preceding change in the ideas and preferences of policy-makers.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is the China-effect real? Ideational change and the political contestation of Chinese state-led investment in Europe

Babić¹,

Dixon²

2021

Preprint

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Chinese outwards investment is increasing in its relevance for the global economy; and its effects on host states are increasingly being scrutinized within International Political Economy discussions. While policy-making was ambiguous about the question of hosting Chinese state-led investment in the early 2010s, we can observe a recent surge of protectionist legal measures across Europe. What explains this trend among different European countries? Through the lens of incremental ideational change, we hypothesize that the rise of China as a global investor shifts the perceptions of policy-makers away from being a source of investment towards questions of national security. We argue that this postulated China-effect affects advanced European economies similarly. We provide evidence by studying the shift inperceptions among policy-makers in a coordinated and a liberal market economy, Germany and the UK. By drawing on document analysis and expert interviews, we unpack the policy processes in both countries in the last decade. Despite being two dissimilar cases, both show a similar outcome in increasingly rejecting Chinese state-led investment on the grounds of national security reasons. Our results add important insights to recent discussions on the ‘geopoliticization’ of European trade and investment rules in the face of a rising China.

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“…The underlying idea is that objects of governance are hybrid, co-produced entities that emerge from complex interactions between expert knowledge, political interventions and mundane practices ( Allan, 2018 ). In other fields of research, it has already been demonstrated how epistemic communities play a central role in the development of new and altered policy ideas ( Swinkels, 2020 ). Examples of such research are: the climate as an object of (global) governance ( Bulkeley, 2005 ; Allan, 2017 ), urban warming as an object of (local) governance ( Boezeman and Kooij, 2015 ), or creative thinking as an object of governance and geopolitical concern in the United States military context during the Cold War ( Van Eekelen, 2017 ).…”

Section: Robots As Objects Of Future Governancementioning

confidence: 99%

Speculating About Robot Moral Standing: On the Constitution of Social Robots as Objects of Governance

Pagter

2021

Front. Robot. AI

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In recent years, the governance of robotic technologies has become an important topic in policy-making contexts. The many potential applications and roles of robots in combination with steady advances in their uptake within society are expected to cause various unprecedented issues, which in many cases will increase the demand for new policy measures. One of the major issues is the way in which societies will address potential changes in the moral and legal status of autonomous social robots. Robot standing is an important concept that aims to understand and elaborate on such changes in robots’ status. This paper explores the concept of robot standing as a useful idea that can assist in the anticipatory governance of social robots. However, at the same time, the concept necessarily involves forms of speculative thinking, as it is anticipating a future that has not yet fully arrived. This paper elaborates on how such speculative engagement with the potential of technology represents an important point of discussion in the critical study of technology more generally. The paper then situates social robotics in the context of anticipatory technology governance by emphasizing the idea that robots are currently in the process of becoming constituted as objects of governance. Subsequently, it explains how specifically a speculative concept like robot standing can be of value in this process.

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How ideas matter in public policy: a review of concepts, mechanisms, and methods

Cited by 63 publications

References 108 publications

Does resource abundance require special approaches to climate policies? The case of Russia

Does resource abundance require special approaches to climate policies? The case of Russia

Is the China-effect real? Ideational change and the political contestation of Chinese state-led investment in Europe

Speculating About Robot Moral Standing: On the Constitution of Social Robots as Objects of Governance

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