Economic Ideas and the Political Construction of Financial Crisis and Reform

The purpose of this workshop is to map and evaluate the recent financial crisis and its continuing fallout from a political economy of ideas perspective. The objective is to account for and explain the variety of persuasive struggles that are being played out across policy areas and countries. The ongoing financial crisis provides an excellent laboratory for exploring how economic ideas interact with political coalitions acting as devices for the empowerment of certain actors, the disempowerment of others and the restructuring or preservation of existing social and political relations. The paradox of the recent financial crisis is that while it opened a window of opportunity for change agents and norm entrepreneurs to push new ideas, these forces for change have had to interact with a pattern of ‘path dependency,’ where prior knowledge informs institutional responses, meaning that there is often a durable quality to pre-existing ideas. Papers at the workshop will assess and evaluate the dynamic interactions between agents promoting change and the pattern of ideational path dependency. Such analysis will not only help us to better understand how ideas relate to interests and vice versa in the current epoch, but also how the dynamics of change and continuity are interacting in relation to the current crisis and therefore its potential political and historical significance as a transformational moment or sequence of events.