Don’t Think It’s a Good Idea: A Critical Analysis of the Role of Ideas in Policy Analysis

It has now become uncontroversial among political scientists to claim that ideas matter, or, more precisely, have explanatory power in the analysis of policy change. Historical, discursive, and rational-choice institutionalism, as well as sociological and constructivist approaches to public policy, seem to broadly converge on this point – although with different positions. And yet, to make the case for a robust ideational explanation, we should be clear on the nature of ideas, where they come from, what do they consist of, and how they change over time. At the outset, we review the most seminal contributions in ideational political science, policy analysis and international relations. We find that ideas are often evoked and utilized as causal factors, but rarely approached rigorously – especially when it comes to micro-foundations. Thus, we unpack the foundational aspects of ideas rather than grey-boxing them and lumping their multiple facets together for the sake of using them as unitary constructs in causal analysis. We then consider the micro-foundations of ideas in cognitive and social psychology and behavioral economics. We find that ideas as such do not even exist in these disciplines. However, these branches of psychology and economics offer a number of closely related concepts with solid experimental/empirical micro-foundations: together, they define the scope for a robust cognitive approach in policy analysis. This finding resonates with some intuitions put forward by political scientists in the past, but more broadly it points to new pathways to causality once we take micro-foundations seriously. We explore one of these pathways in section four, looking at the causality of cognition, learning and change. In the conclusions we reflect on how to extend the lessons learned by exploring micro-foundations to recast the cognitive analysis of public policy, using contructs that perform better than ideas.