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Why did the Liberal Party of Canada (LPC) and the New Democratic Party (NDP) enter into a supply-and-confidence agreement in March 2022? Interparty cooperation among federal parties is rare during minority governments, and yet the agreement created a formal alliance in the House of Commons. In this article, we argue that ideational factors led to the 2022 agreement. We examine the role of programmatic beliefs and strategic learning during the COVID-19 crisis and the 2019-2021 election sequence to shed light on changes in federal parliamentary strategies in Canada. From ad-hoc voting coalitions to extended cooperation on social policymaking, the LPC and the NDP learned how to work together in the House of Commons while using the agreement as a tool to compete with each other in anticipation of the next federal election. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines variation in early childhood education and care (ECEC) expansion in four 'latecomer' reformers: Germany, England, South Korea and Japan. Taking a comparative approach through an analysis of policy documents, it focuses on the role of ideas as coalition magnets in explaining the more extensive and sustained policy shifts in Germany and Korea, in contrast to the more limited and fragmented reforms in England and Japan. As the comparative literature struggles to explain variation in ECEC expansion, this focus on ideas provides a significant contribution, highlighting why ECEC reform became supported by a broad cross-class coalition in Germany and Korea but not in England or Japan. The theoretical contribution argues that coalition magnets are formed when the polysemic potential of a policy is drawn out by key actors strategically linking it to several problem definitions, which can appeal to diverse political actors and forge lasting consensus for reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the literature on the role of agency in the policy process, relatively little attention has been devoted to how agents define policy problems. This article helps to address this gap by asking when and how policy entrepreneurs are successful in defining problems. The article rests on a framework that shows how policy entrepreneurs holding specific ideas and given a propitious socioeconomic context are able to define problems, translate those problems into new frames, and draw on those frames, while using their personal skills and political and institutional resources, to help build supportive coalitions in favor of policy change. Illustrated by a puzzling case in the field of European mobility policy, the article offers a new perspective on the role of ideas at the problem definition stage of the policy process, while providing a richer understanding of the policy entrepreneur as a driver of policy change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there is a growing literature on transnational ideational processes in sub-Saharan Africa, the linkages between local, national, and transnational actors and ideas in African social policy would gain from more systematic mapping. In this paper, we explore what we call the "scales of ideational policy influence" by sketching a multi-level, actor-centric, and institutionalist perspective on ideational policy influence at the local, national, and transnational scales. This discussion leads to analysis of how these scales interact in terms of specific ideas and how both governmental and non-governmental actors seek to impact social policy decisions in sub-Saharan Africa. To illustrate the three scales of ideational influence and their interaction, the paper turns to the making of poverty reduction policies in Ghana. We show how policy ideas move from the global level to a national and subnational level using ideational mechanisms aided by the institutional position of actors and material factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current approach to the study of property cannot distinguish the causes of human action from the consequences of human action. It also cordons off morality thereby opening a hole in how property rights work. The scientific difficulty is that our analysis must constantly shift between the individual, their local community, and the larger polity in which both are embedded, in order to explain simultaneously different levels of consequences with different kinds of causes. The difficulty is made worse when we construct mental models without the human mind. My framework leaves the human mind in. Since Armen Alchian and Harold Demsetz, the study of property rights has had a decidedly external stance: the institution imposes itself on the individual from the outside. The problem of property rights, however, also calls for inquiry from the inside out of human agency, because in the study of property, ideas are primary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A property right, the standard view maintains, is a proper subset of the most complete and comprehensive set of incidents for full ownership of a thing. The subsidiary assumption is that the pieces that are property rights compose the whole that is ownership or property, i.e., that property rights explain property. In reversing the standard view I argue that (1) a custom of intelligent and meaningful human action explains property and that (2) as a custom, property is a historical process of selecting actions conditional on the context. My task is to explain how a physical world of human bodies with minds that feel, think, know, and want gives rise to a custom of property with meaning and purpose. Property is primary because ideas are primary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Informed by moral economy theories, this article presents a qualitative study of the normative construction of and contestation over a new in-work benefit in Hong Kong, the Low-income Working Family Allowance (LIFA). Using a policy stakeholder approach to examining the public's ideas and justifications of LIFA, the findings reveal the eligibility-defined entitlement shared by claimants, scepticism towards long working hours conditionality required by LIFA, complex understanding of deservingness and self-reliance, and dissatisfaction with the closing gap between welfare and wages. This article connects moral economy theories to the normative basis of a social security system, offering insights for capturing the dynamics of consensus and controversies about social welfare. It also extends the research on morality and social welfare from Western countries to an Asian context. The case of Hong Kong evidences how policy stakeholders make moral sense of a new welfare in the absence of social right language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article challenges exclusively rationalist accounts of and offers a complementary explanation for the emergence of liberal trade policy in the Kennedy administration. I draw on recent insights in constructivist institutionalism to emphasize the need to take agency seriously in institutionalist research. Using archival records, I analyze the decisive role Kennedy's advisers played as carriers of ideas in advocating for liberal trade policy by 'constructing the national interest', thus convincing a reticent president to support attempts aimed at achieving closer economic integration, culminating in the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. Insights from their role as advisers can help in specifying the role of agency in the ideas and institutional change literature, through strategic action which shaped a political leader's belief and put political issues on the agenda. By grasping agency in terms of making ideas actionable, an important step is taken in advancing endogenous approaches of institutional change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the centrality of education to economic growth and social development, successive governments in post-colonial Ghana have implemented policies to improve the quality of education in the country. In line with this, Ghana embarked on its first major education reform in 1987 under the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) government. While several studies have been conducted to explain this reform, these studies have largely been descriptive and theoretically, have over relied on the conditionality thesis. Our study draws on ideational literature and research interviews to offer an alternative explanation of the 1987 reform. Drawing extensively on the ideational concepts of bricolage and translation and focusing on the actors using these two mechanisms, the study argues that, while exogenous forces did impact the 1987 reform, it was mainly driven by endogenous factors featuring both path dependent and departing changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, automated essay evaluation (AEE) systems play an important role in evaluating essays and have been successfully used in large-scale writing assessments. However, existing AEE systems mostly focus on grammar or shallow content measurements rather than higher-order traits such as ideas. This paper proposes a new formulation of graph-based features for concept maps using word embeddings to evaluate the quality of ideas for Chinese compositions. The concept map derived from the student's composition is composed of the concepts appearing in the essay and the co-occurrence relationship between the concepts. By utilizing real compositions written by eighth-grade students from a large-scale assessment, the scoring accuracy of the computer evaluation system (named AECC-I: Automated Evaluation for Chinese Compositions—Ideas) is higher than the baselines. The results indicate that the proposed method deepens the construct-relevant coverage of automatic ideas evaluation in compositions and that it can provide constructive feedback for students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction The updated programme for postgraduate psychiatry training in Malta was implemented in 2017. The trainees’ perspective was identified as an important and untapped resource in implementing positive change. Objectives 1. Identification of lacunae within the training programme 2. Acquire ideas regarding new initiatives 3. Identify what is particularly good. 4. Present a comprehensive report to the relevant stakeholders 5. Use of findings to work on concrete changes, with re-audit in 1 year. Methods Data from a national online survey of 12 Maltese Psychiatric Trainees from a total of 19 (63%% response rate) were examined. Both qualitative and quantitative data was gathered by making use of Likert scales as well as open ended questions. Various areas were surveyed, including 1. Ease of accessibility and quality of Clinical Supervision & Educational Supervision 2. Lectures and Teaching Seminars 3. After hours Duties 4. Psychotherapy Module 5. Preparation for MRCpsych Examinations Results A noticeable difficulty in accessing clinical supervision (66%), the lack of research presentation opportunities (75%), as well as difficulties in the psychotherapy module (66.7%) were noted. Conclusions All results were collated into a six-page report. This report was presented to both the Maltese Postgraduate Training Committee as well as the Executive committee of the Maltese Association of Psychiatry and the Chairman of the Psychiatry Department. Various suggestions were flagged for Implementation including: 1. Rotation specific teaching 2. Restructure of the Psychotherapy module including training 3. Annual Research Day 4. Complex Case Discussions Follow up plans include reaudit in one year following the implemented changes. Disclosure No significant relationships.

This is a review of Joel Mokyr's fascinating book entitled A Culture of Growth. The work is summarized, noting its focus on Darwin-style evolutionary explanations of cultural change. But Mokyr's emphasis on cultural entrepreneurs and positive feedbacks in the procreation of ideas is insufficient to explain the origins of modern economic growth. Too much explanatory weight is placed on too few extraordinary people. It is argued that Mokyr's analysis should be extended, to bring the evolution of institutions, as well as the evolution of culture, into the picture at an additional level. The role of inter-state rivalry and exogenous shocks has also to be underlined. This kind of analysis can be developed within the framework of generalized Darwinism, which Mokyr himself adopts. This is a major and highly stimulating book. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands have different historical patterns of industrialization, but developed similar patterns of industrial coordination and cooperation. Theories accounting for industrial relations systems (economic structure, power resources, and party/electoral systems) have difficulty accounting for the similarities among these cases. Therefore, we explore the historical depictions of labor appearing in literature to evaluate whether cross-national distinctions in cultural conceptions of labor have some correspondence to distinctions between coordinated and liberal industrial relations systems. We hypothesize that historical literary depictions of labor are associated with the evolution of industrial systems, and apply computational text analyses to large corpora of literary texts. We find that countries (Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands) with coordinated, corporatist industrial relations in the 20th century share similar cultural constructions about labor relations dating back to at least 1770. Literary depictions found in modern coordinated/corporatist countries are significantly different from those found in Britain, a country with liberal/pluralist industrial relations systems. The research has significance for our understanding of the role of culture in the evolution of modern political economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Berkeley's likeness principle is the claim that 'an idea can be like nothing but an idea'. The likeness principle is intended to undermine representationalism: the view (that Berkeley attributes to thinkers like Descartes and Locke) that all human knowledge is mediated by ideas in the mind that represent material objects. Yet, Berkeley appears to leave the likeness principle unargued for. This has led to several attempts to explain why Berkeley accepts it. In contrast to metaphysical and epistemological interpretations available in the literature, in this essay I defend a conceptual interpretation. I argue that Berkeley accepts the likeness principle on the basis of (1) his commitment to the transparency of ideas and (2) his account of resemblance, which he sets out in his works on vision. Thus, I provide an explanation for Berkeley's reasons for accepting the likeness principle that, appropriately, focuses on his views concerning ideas and likeness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ideational variables have frequently been employed in positivist-minded and materialist analyses of state behaviour. Almost inevitably, because of these commitments, such studies run into theoretical challenges relating to the use of ideas. In this article, I suggest that integrating ideational factors in positivist and materialist approaches to state behaviour requires: (1) distinguishing conceptually between interests and ideation as well as between individual beliefs and social ideas; and (2) addressing challenges of operationalisation and measurability. To that end, I employ neoclassical realism as a case study. I argue that a re-conceptualisation of ideas as externalised individual beliefs employed in political deliberation allows neoclassical realists to focus on how ideas and ideational competition intervene in the transmission belt from materially given interests to foreign policy choice. At the same time, it more clearly operationalises ideas as identifiable in language and communication. I suggest this reconceptualisation, while consistent with realist paradigmatic assumptions, need not be limited to neoclassical realism. Instead, transposed to different paradigms, it would similarly allow positivist-minded constructivists and institutionalists to avoid a conceptually and methodologically awkward equation of different ideational factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In a rapidly changing world, middle powers with no obvious role to play on the global stage have the difficult task to read the international environment in order to formulate and implement a coherent and possibly effective foreign policy. In order to do so, decision makers either reproduce old ideas or develop new ones. Considering the ideas put forward in their inaugural speeches by Prime Ministers and Foreign Affairs Ministers in office after 2001, we suggest that Italy’s institutional actors appear to be aware of the changes occurred in the international system after 1989, and in particular after 9/11. The national role conceptions sustaining Italy’s present foreign policy goals reflect such awareness, being quite different with respect to the picture offered by Holsti in his seminal work published in 1970. Ideas expressing foreign policy goals are also reasonably well grounded in ideas on how the world works or linked to operational ideas, yet the country’s foreign policy appears feebly focused, even though focus is explicitly very much sought for. Some explanations for such a lack of focus which makes Italy’s foreign policy design rather ineffective are offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internal analogies are created if the knowledge of source domain is obtained only from the cognition of designers. In this paper, an understanding of the use of internal analogies in conceptual design is developed by studying: the types of internal analogies; the roles of internal analogies; the influence of design problems on the creation of internal analogies; the role of experience of designers on the use of internal analogies; the levels of abstraction at which internal analogies are searched in target domain, identified in source domain, and realized in the target domain; and the effect of internal analogies from the natural and artificial domains on the solution space created using these analogies. To facilitate this understanding, empirical studies of design sessions from earlier research, each involving a designer solving a design problem by identifying requirements and developing conceptual solutions, without using any support, are used. The following are the important findings: designers use analogies from the natural and artificial domains; analogies are used for generating requirements and solutions; the nature of the design problem influences the use of analogies; the role of experience of designers on the use of analogies is not clearly ascertained; analogical transfer is observed only at few levels of abstraction while many levels remain unexplored; and analogies from the natural domain seem to have more positive influence than the artificial domain on the number of ideas and variety of idea space. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We know a lot about the essence of the ideology factor in parties' trajectories but remarkably little of how and why this is expressed and translated into the theoretical building blocks that rationalize it. This article takes up this forgotten issue, attempts to locate the concept of party ideology development, clarify its usefulness in the understanding of the relationship between parties and ideologies, outline an effective measurement process and, in doing so, shed light on avenues of research in the comparative study of party politics that so far remain unutilized. The main argument is that although party ideology development has evaded scholarly attention, it remains a germane concept through which we can further disentangle forms of ideological expression. Systematically integrating the development of ideology into the study of party politics can add to our corpus of knowledge about how and why parties adapt and differ between them and can have implications for democratic theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role of cultural assumptions in the formation of the only Iranian social programme designed exclusively for women, “Empowering Women without Guardians”. It examines these assumptions at different stages of the policy process: problem definition, policy formulation, and policy adoption. As shown, assumptions behind the adopted policy are not consistent with the ones underlying the original problem definition; women are considered mothers at the problem definition stage, but at the policy adoption stage they are understood as workers. The relative power of these assumptions helps explain both continuity and change in Iranian social policy towards women. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, I argue that Hume's solution to a problem that contemporary metaphysicians call “the problem of universals” would be rather trope-theoretical than some other type of nominalism. The basic idea in different trope theories is that particular properties, i.e., tropes are postulated to account for the fact that there are particular beings resembling each other. I show that Hume's simple sensible perceptions are tropes: simple qualities. Accordingly, their similarities are explained by these tropes themselves and their resemblance. Reading Hume as a trope nominalist sheds light on his account of general ideas, perceptions, relations and nominalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Many of the central theses of Hume's philosophy – his rejection of real relations, universals, abstract objects and necessary causal relations – had precedents in the later medieval nominalist tradition. Hume and his medieval predecessors developed complex semantic theories to show both how ontologies are apt to become inflated and how, if we understand carefully the processes by which meaning is generated, we can achieve greater ontological parsimony. Tracing a trajectory from those medieval traditions to Hume reveals Hume to be more radical, particularly in his rejection of abstraction and abstract ideas. Hume's denial of general, abstract ideas is consistent with his philosophical principles but fails to appreciate the more sophisticated nominalist approaches to abstraction, the result of which is a theoretically impoverished account of our capacity for generalization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The status of ideational explanations in political science has been strengthened by the argument that institutionalized ideas structure actors’ identification of their interests as well as the interests of their political adversaries. Despite its utility, the focus on the institutionalization of ideas has had the unfortunate consequence that actors are often, implicitly or explicitly, believed to internalize ideas, making it difficult to understand how actors are able to change their ideas and institutions. Drawing on cultural sociology and ideational theory, the paper introduces the ‘bricoleur’ as an alternative vision of agency. It is argued, first, that actors cannot cognitively internalize highly structured symbolic systems, and ideas are thus ‘outside the minds of actors’. Second, using the cognitive schemas at their disposal, actors construct strategies of action based on pre-constructed ideational and political institutions. Third, actors must work actively and creatively with the ideas and institutions they use, because the structure within which actors work does not determine their response to new circumstances. Fourth, as a vast number of ideational studies have shown, actors face a complex array of challenges in getting their ideas to the top of the policy agenda, which makes it all the more important to act pragmatically, putting ideas together that may not be logically compatible but rather answer political and cultural logics. In sum, agency often takes the form of bricolage, where bits and pieces of the existing ideational and institutional legacy are put together in new forms leading to significant political transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

All three of the traditionally recognized new institutionalisms – rational choice, historical, and sociological – have increasingly sought to ‘endogenize’ change, which has often meant a turn to ideas and discourse. This article shows that the approaches of scholars coming out of each of these three institutionalist traditions who take ideas and discourse seriously can best be classified as part of a fourth ‘new institutionalism’ – discursive institutionalism (DI) – which is concerned with both the substantive content of ideas and the interactive processes of discourse in institutional context. It argues that this newest of the ‘new institutionalisms’ has the greatest potential for providing insights into the dynamics of institutional change by explaining the actual preferences, strategies, and normative orientations of actors. The article identifies the wide range of approaches that fit this analytic framework, illustrating the ways in which scholars of DI have gone beyond the limits of the traditional institutionalisms on questions of interests and uncertainty, critical junctures and incremental change, norms and culture. It defines institutions dynamically – in contrast to the older neo-institutionalisms’ more static external rule-following structures of incentives, path-dependencies, and cultural framing – as structures and constructs of meaning internal to agents whose ‘background ideational abilities’ enable them to create (and maintain) institutions while their ‘foreground discursive abilities’ enable them to communicate critically about them, to change (or maintain) them. But the article also points to areas for improvement in DI, including the theoretical analysis of processes of ideational change, the use of the older neo-institutionalisms for background information, and the incorporation of the power of interests and position into accounts of the power of ideas and discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]