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This article compares how the United States and Germany deregulated labor markets between the 1980s and 2010s in response to the rise of neoliberalism. Building on literature with a focus on ideas and national knowledge regimes, the authors argue that the trajectories of labor market deregulation across the two countries are explained by the distinct social organization of ideas. The latter refers to the actors and institutions involved in the production and dissemination of ideas (including think tanks and public research institutes), their access and ways of communicating to political elites and electorates, levels of shared academic standards across the political divide, and related degrees of competition or cooperation in the production of new knowledge and policy ideas. Moving beyond previous employment relations literature with a focus on institutions and power, the article breaks new theoretical ground by demonstrating how the social organization of ideas is a key intermediary in explaining employment relations change and continuity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why are rich citizens not taxed more heavily – despite growing inequality (aversion)? The literature offers several explanations, all of which ultimately work through the minds and actions of politicians. Taking Germany as a case, we therefore ask in 25 semi-structured interviews which obstacles left-wing politicians perceive in taxing the rich. Overall, tax increases are perceived as difficult projects. Organized business is described as a major barrier, but in a way that goes beyond existing accounts: besides classical lobbying, business interests are seen to influence electoral politics through long-term communication strategies shaping tax preferences. Moreover, the interviews point to a previously unrecognized organizational barrier that we coin the 'vicious competence cycle': left-wing politicians are often overwhelmed by tax issues which results in consequential disadvantages when confronted with resourceful anti-tax actors. They describe how party-internal discourses shape these competence patterns by influencing motivations, feasibility perceptions, and electoral strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a theory that links issue salience and actor polarisation to the uses of learning heuristics in the policy process. In harking back to research on public policy, behavioural economics, and crisis management, we argue that policy makers use two learning heuristics when they update their policy ideas: policy-oriented learning and power-oriented learning. The article develops theoretical expectations that link issue salience and polarisation of actor constellations to policy-oriented and power-oriented learning. To illustrate the theoretical expectations, the article discusses EU anti-crisis policies dealing with the 2007–2009 global financial and economic crisis and its aftermath, as well as the responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany and the U.S. as pathway cases. Overall, this article contributes to the understanding of learning and the political uses of ideas in the policy process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What explains the nature of a dominant state's systemic crisis response? In the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008, the U.S. acted as the hegemon for the world economy, showing 'benign' leadership by serving as consumer, investor, and lender of last resort. During the euro crisis two years later, Germany played a rather different role, practicing a more 'coercive' form of rules-based leadership within Europe's regional context. In this paper, I explain how ideas and crisis narratives, informed by national economic traditions, shaped how the leading states behaved. By rescuing Charles Kindleberger's original version of hegemonic stability theory from both its realist and liberal institutionalist interpreters, the paper clarifies why elites in the U.S. followed a hardheaded path of soft Keynesian ideas resulting in global public goods provision while their counterparts in Germany, be it more constrained, opted for a more principled road of rule enforcing ordo-liberal ideas avoiding public goods provision. The crucial role of ideas – in addition to structural and institutional factors – in defining the national interest during periods of crisis helps us better understand "why hegemonic leadership is what states make of it." This led American and German elites to interpret Kindleberger in very different ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do institutional logics travel within a political economy? Employing insights from historical and ideational institutionalist theory, this article offers a novel understanding of change dynamics as driven by actors' creation of institutional interlinkages. It develops the causal mechanism of "invasion from within," consisting of a three-stage process: the progressive weakening of a policy paradigm within one institutional site coinciding with a strengthening of the policy paradigm in another; the building of a coalition within the exporting field; and the use of framing strategies to "localize" adjacent logics of action and delegitimize adversarial coalitions. The analytical purchase of the argument is corroborated through process tracing of the German pension paradigm shift during the 1990s, showing that ideas about private capital formation developed in finance were redirected toward old-age provision and strategically transferred to the pension arena by a coalition of actors from the German finance domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do cultural ideas shape market construction? What do ideas ‘do’ to actors in markets? The paper presents an empirical case study of the reconstitution of the German wine market following an EU legislative intervention. I use Bourdieu's theory of fields to analyse the actors’ economic, social and cultural capitals and the impact of these capitals on the actors’ positioning in the political debate. Sensitised by recurring problems in the empirical data analysis, I then, however, argue that Weber's notion of ideas, as presented in his famous switchmen metaphor, is better suited than, or indeed should serve as a complement to, Bourdieu's frame of analysis. It is better suited, I argue, because it refers to a unique and irreducible source of culture while Bourdieu's capitals remain ‘tools' in a struggle for power and dominance in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Ideas are at their most powerful as an explanatory variable when they lead agents to go against any broadly reasonable interpretation of their material self-interests. They become even more intriguing when they are instrumental in actuallycausinga crisis, in which actors undercut their own stated goals and then continue to make matters worse by sticking to those same ideas, even in the light of clear evidence that the policies they inspire are not working. This contribution shows two dynamics between power and ideas to explain Germany's behavior during the euro crisis. The first dynamic examines the changing macroeconomic consensus on how to conduct monetary and fiscal policy that governed the euro from 1999 to 2012. The second dynamic shows how a strict adherence to Germany's ordoliberal ideas of budgetary rules and structural reform turned a containable Greek fiscal problem into a full-blown systemic sovereign debt crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The issues of 'policy diffusion' or 'policy transfer' and 'mutual learning' have become important topics in comparative research on social policy and health systems. In current debates on explaining reform in ' Bismarckian' social (health) insurance systems, however, these issues have been neglected. In particular, the role of 'negative lesson-drawing' in the sense of avoiding mistakes of others has not often been considered. This article compares health system change in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands, three countries with health systems of the social insurance type. In contrast to the existing literature, our analysis stresses that these countries have taken different reform paths since the 1990s. By applying a most similar systems design, we analyze how far cross-border lesson-drawing has contributed to health system divergence in the three countries. The empirical basis of the analysis is semi-structured qualitative expert interviews, a method appropriate for tracing processes of lesson-drawing. We argue that in order to fully understand the diverging reform trajectories, we need to take into account how political decision-makers refer to (negative) experiences of other countries. Generally, national driving forces for health system change were at the heart of many crucial reforms during the period studied. Nevertheless, we claim that it was the German bad practice role model that kept the reform paths of Austria and Germany apart in the Austrian health reform discussion between 2000 and 2005. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article explains the political origins of an 1839 law regulating the factory employment of children in Prussia. The article has two aims. First, it seeks to explain why Prussia adopted the particular law that it did. Existing historical explanations of this particular policy change are not correct, largely because they fail to take into account the actual motivations and intentions of key reformers. Second, the article contributes to theories of the role of ideas in public policymaking. Ideas interact with institutional and political factors to serve as motivators and as resources for policy change. As motivators, they drive political action and shape the content of policy programs; as resources, they enable political actors to recruit supporters and forge alliances. I offer a theory of the relationship between ideas, motivation, and political action, and I develop a methodological framework for assessing the reliability of political actors' expressed motivations. Further, I explain how political actors use ideas as resources by deploying three specific ideational strategies: framing, borrowing, and citing. By tracing how different understandings of the child labor problem motivated and were embodied in two competing child labor policy proposals, I show how the ideas underlying reform had significant consequences for policy outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For much of the past two decades since unification, the literature on the German economy has largely focused on the erosion of the German model of organized capitalism and emphasized institutional decline and the corresponding rise of neoliberalism. The first part of the article analyzes the strains unification placed on German economic performance that caused many observers to call for modification of the model in a more neo-liberal direction. The second part takes a different focus and lays out the main rationale of the paper. It inquires why such a coordinated market economy was created in the first place and whether a renewed form of it might still be useful for Germany, the European Union, and other developed democracies in the early twenty-first century. The third section articulates the origins of the institutional and ideational components of these coordinated market economy models, during both the Bismarckian and Social Market Economy periods. The final portion inquires whether the failure of the contemporary liberal market economy approach in the wake of the worldwide financial crisis and severe recession represents a possible opening for the creation of a third coordinated market economy not only for Germany but for a redesigned European Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to put a lens on the issue of international security cooperation after 11 September 2001, this article examines the question of how collective action in International Relations becomes possible. The author maintains that a fair amount of inter-state collective action can be understood, even explained, by analysing the culture of the international system. Using discourse analysis as a tool, the analysis addresses the underlying ideas, norms and identities that constitute the relationship between the United States and Japan, on the one hand, and Germany and the United States, on the other, as it has evolved since September 2001. The method exposes how some ideas are privileged over others, how norms are maintained, reformulated and abandoned, how identity is constructed and how power is legitimized in the ‘war on terror’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]