The relationship between political ideas and practices constitutes one of the perennial questions in political science. While few perspectives today would deny that actors and their practices are not just shaped by interests but also by ideas, conceptualizing the impact of ideas that were often conceived a long time before actors seemingly implement them, remains a daunting task.
This paper attempts to contribute to the task of accounting for the power of ideas through a comparison of three theoretical frameworks that conceptualize the link between theories and practices.
The first is associated with the approach of discursive institutionalism. Discursive institutionalists conceive of ideas or discursive phenomena in general analogously to ‘real’ institutions: they structure actions, i.e. they enable some actions and make some of them more likely than others, while precluding others altogether.
While discursive institutionalists emphasize the constitutive impact of ideas, i.e. they make it possible to think in certain ways and derive respective maxims for actions from that, the second framework discussed thinks about the impact of ideas slightly differently. Critical realists focus on the analysis of causal relationships have argued that the constitutive impact of ideas should be seen as a causal factor effecting certain practices.
Finally, the governmentality perspective inspired by the work of Michel Foucault is introduced. For Foucault ideas are not conceived independently of their context of implementation, rather this context is always already part of the ideational work. Still, actual practices derived from ideas never work the way they are supposed to be thus leading to an ever-renewed problematization of both, ideas and practices.
The paper will offer a critical discussion of the three frameworks and will also compare the weaknesses and strengths of their respective conceptualizations with respect to a particular empirical example: the power of ordoliberal ideas.
