The Role of Ideas in Policy-Change: The Case of European Economic and Monetary Policy

In recent decades, the political sciences have seen a broad acknowledgement that ideas, paradigms and discourses may be important drivers of policy-change. Scholars have put forward theses regarding the different characteristics and forms of beliefs, ideas and paradigms that may play a role in policy-change. Moreover, several authors have discussed the level of commensurability and propensity for stability or flexibility of the different forms of ideas. Finally, authors have debated the potentially effects of ideas in terms of their results: Do we see incremental or sudden policy-change or a hybrid form of policy-change, like the punctuated equilibrium model? However, not much empirical research has been conducted into how these ideational factors are actually causally or constitutionally linked to policy-change or stability. In theoretical sense, scholars have discussed the mechanisms that may link ideas to policy-change and identified that ideas may act as causes, as switchmen, as road maps, as strategic weapons or even as a gestalt that unconsciously shapes actors’ very understanding of the world. However, few studies have actually tried empirically to study these mechanisms, or how different kinds of ideas, the various mechanisms and forms of policy-change hang together. In this paper, an attempt is made to empirically differentiate between the different mechanisms and to come up with some tentative expectations of how the different kinds of ideas, the various mechanisms and forms of policy-change hang together. In the empirical part, the paper will focus on the domain of European Economic and Monetary Policy. It will make use of a data-base of key actors’ and institutions’ cognitive maps and explore how the ideas embedded in these cognitive maps relate to a key instance of policy-change and non-policy-change: the centralization of a stricter enforcement of budgetary rules through the Fiscal compact and the independence of the ECB.