The role of ideas and discourse in comparative political economy

Vivien A. Schmidt

Chapter 3 in Handbook of Comparative Political Economy, 2025, pp 68-86 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter explores the great variety of ways in which ideas and discourse can be understood to have played a role in comparative political economy. The chapter considers not only the substantive ways in which scholars have discussed their effects on political economies at the national and supranational levels but also the methodological approaches through which scholars have demonstrated their impact. The chapter considers scholars’ approaches to ideas and discourse in their great variety, including the different forms, types and levels used by agents to exercise ideational power via their discursive interactions in different institutional contexts, as well as on the mechanisms of continuity and change. The chapter begins by using the overlapping analytic frameworks of discursive institutionalism and sociological institutionalism to distinguish such approaches from the other two neo-institutionalisms—rational choice institutionalism and historical institutionalism—that don’t take ideas (let alone discourse) seriously. It concludes with a substantive focus on the resilience of one specific set of political economic ideas since the 1980s, generally known under the rubric of neoliberalism.

Keywords: Ideas; Discourse; Discursive institutionalism; Sociological institutionalism; Comparative political economy; Ideational power (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035327775
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