How political ideas matter - reflections on method

The study of politics is almost by necessity closely linked to the study of history. Thus, political theories of political behaviour, of state building and the formation of political institutions are built on empirical studies of “historical facts”. The term “historical facts” is, however, to be understood in a broad sense since it not only includes statistics, documentation of wars and lists of governments, but also beliefs, ideas and expressions of political thought. In this paper I argue for the importance of studying political thought, ideas and ideology empirically as variables explaining the formation of specific political institutions. The focus lays on how to form an analytical frame that combines discussions of the meaning and understanding of history with studies of the formation of political institutions. The methodological discussion in the paper, is based on the research frame I used in my PhD-thesis På andra sidan välfärdsstaten – en studie i politiska idéers betydelse (The other side of the welfare state – how political ideas matter). The book, published in 1999, presents a case study showing how the Swedish welfare state model – “folkhemmet” (people’s home) - took form during the early 20th century. Following the arguments developed by Goldstein & Keohane (1993), Sikkink (1993) and Berman (1998), I designed a research frame making it possible to study how specific political ideas, were embedded into the core of the state apparatus making way for a path dependant development that lasted nearly a hundred years. In order to reconstruct the historical moment and the ideological discussion I needed an analytical frame that not only made it possible to discern the “folkhem” ideology from within the historical context, but also the alternative ideology that might have lead to a different political path. The method used included several steps of intellectual work and relied heavily on the following four sources: i. linguistic theory of the influence of metaphors on human thinking and acting formulated by Lakoff & Johnson (1980) and Lakoff (1987) ii. arguments concerning meaning and understanding of history and politics put forward by R.G. Collingwood, Peter Winch and Quentin Skinner iii. empirical theoretical framework for studying ideas developed by Judith Goldstein and Robert Keohane i. the liberal-communitarian debate where I follow a scheme put up by Simon Caney (1992). In this paper I describe and question the methodological considerations made in the previous study. My conclusion is that the research frame in general is still valid even though some of the theoretical assumptions should be updated to apply to research questions formulated in 2016.