The Problems of Two Literatures Trying to Explain Policy Change

2.2.1 Limitations of Leadership Concepts in Explaining Policy Change

There have been notable efforts in the leadership literature to spell out the relationship between leadership and policy change. A considerable amount of theorizing has developed on how leaders should behave in order to accomplish innovation and far-reaching policy change. In addition, scholars have been thinking about the conditions under which behaviour associated with leadership leads to important reforms. Notwithstanding these efforts, I argue that the leadership literature generally suffers from a shortcoming in specifying such behaviour and needs to be improved in some respects. More specifically, the problem lies in the following: although all leadership concepts that will be discussed point in fairly general terms to the possibilities for individual actors to change policy instruments or institutional structures, they tend to remain vague on how political agents need to behave and what they need to communicate to their audiences in order to successfully push through change. In other words, what I find lacking is a concise specification of what leaders do and say to achieve change, including the causal mechanisms between leadership-related behaviour and/or leadership tasks and structural reforms. Obviously, there is some variety between leadership theories regarding this aspect, which will be illustrated further in the literature review.

As a consequence, further efforts are necessary in order to improve theorizing on the types of behaviour linked to leadership. In my view, it is possible, with the help of the ideational literature (see Section 2.4), to formulate theories about reform-oriented leadership in more concrete terms with a view to improving them. Possibly, doing so will also contribute to an improved conceptualization and understanding of processes of major policy change. I argue that the key to improving conceptualisations of leadership (in that they explain the link between leadership and reforms in more concrete terms) lies in combining them with elements of idea-based approaches to politics and policy-making.

2.2.2 Limitations of Ideational Approaches

Just as there are weaknesses in the leadership literature, there are also problems with ideational approaches. To me, the first apparent limitation is that idea-based approaches to policy-making and policy change sometimes result in bold statements about the causal effects of ideas in relation to policy outcomes. That is to say, scholarly work on the role of ideas in policy-making tends to make claims about causal explanations, but fails to specify and demonstrate the causal nexus between the presence of certain ideas and their effects. This is regrettable, as specifying causal mechanisms is a way of making theoretical frameworks more sensitive to the dynamics of political struggles in policy-making (Andeweg 2000). Whether this omission is intended or not, fact is that evidence for the presence of certain policy ideas or a policy discourse is often implicitly linked to a policy outcome without providing further explanation as to how these are connected to a specific policy outcome. Schmidt, for example, rightly asks how to establish the causal influence of discourse, but instead of an answer, she formulates statements that sum up conditions: ‘For discourse to have a significant influence in the adoption of a policy programme, in short, it must be able to help policy actors overcome entrenched interests, institutional obstacles, and cultural blinkers to change’ (Schmidt 2002b: 251).

Secondly, in my view it is difficult to imagine ideas having an impact by themselves, i.e. completely detached from what policy-makers do, let alone show such a connection empirically. This is because ideas are cognitive and/or normative constructs, which cannot enter the policy-

Ideational Leadership

making arena on their own and, for that reason, need an agent to gather them, put them on a political agenda and communicate them to a certain audience (cf. Ross 2000b; Lieberman 2002). Even though there are various, and sometimes competing, theoretical perspectives on how public policy is made, few would deny that actors have some sort of impact on policy-making, even within the confines of institutional possibilities; the issues involved make up the seemingly intractable structure-agency problem (see for a lucid description of the problem Berman 2001). Some observers, however, ascribe more importance to agents, arguing that policy transitions should be understood in terms of a relationship between structural possibilities and political agency (Campbell 1998). I rather agree with the latter view as it helps to reintroduce the opportunities, implied by political leadership, into a perspective of politics dominated by institutions. To give an example, the actor in question may be a policy-maker who has developed a new vision on a policy problem and “sells” a new policy or reform initiative to the opposition party and interest groups. However, this seemingly simple act is likely to encounter difficulties in the political arena and cannot be performed by any political agent: ideas that effect changes on the political agenda must typically be promoted by influential policy-makers who enjoy institutional access (Béland 2005: ???).41 Those influential policy-makers would need to get an issue on their government’s policy or decision-making agenda, which is typically laid down in coalition agreements or similar public policy declarations outlining new policy or policy reforms. I take this observation as a prompt to study more closely the possibilities of political agency influencing the course of structural welfare state reforms: in order to bring change onto the political agenda (and ultimately to make decisions on particular reform initiatives), ideas must be promoted by political agents that enjoy institutional access. In my framework, these potential ideational leaders occupy posts of key policy-makers, that is, they are senior politicians such as cabinet members.42 To sum up, I argue that idea-based approaches to policy change can be improved by linking ideas to a certain actor or “carrier” and by specifying how this carrier makes use of them in pushing for policy reform. In this undertaking, it is necessary to think carefully about the causal mechanisms linking policy-makers’ behaviour and policy outcomes, starting with the assumption that the quality of theories can be improved by specifying - as far as possible - the mechanisms linking agents and outcomes.

In order to address the limitations of the two literatures, I present the concept of ideational leadership (IL). It rests on the insight that leadership theories, which specify functional requirements of leadership, can be made more concrete with the help of ideational approaches, if these offer some input on how leaders communicate effectively in order to effect policy change. Concepts of leadership generally lack precision in describing how political agents behave when they get involved in the process of pushing through change. On the other hand, the ideational literature tends to claim that ideas have causal effects on policy outcomes without substantiating this claim and without considering their link to the policy-making process. In my view, these shortcomings may be addressed in two ways. To respond to the shortcoming of leadership concepts, it is necessary to shift the theoretical focus onto the carrier of such ideas, i.e. on political

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Campbell is not specific about what he means by ‘political agenda’. In public policy research, one can finds a distinction between different kinds of agendas, such as in Rogers and Dearing’s (1987) model of agenda-setting, which features a media, a public and a policy agenda (see for an overview of the field Parsons 1995: 110 ff.)

42 _{Only few studies on the impact of cabinet members, i.e. ministers, on policy outcomes have been undertaken, but they}

underscore the importance of taking the micro-level of analysis into account (see for an overview of the field Parsons 1995: 110 ff.) On the other hand, the scope of ministerial authority may be restricted by prime ministerial government, coalition leadership, a government programme or rules of collective decision-making (Andeweg 2000).

Chapter 2

actors and how they make use of or handle ideas in specific policy processes. Furthermore, in order to address the causality question and the lack of agency when considering ideas by themselves, it is necessary to engage in empirical research focusing on those actors. Such research may examine the role that ideas have played in actors’ behaviour and, in doing so, describes or illustrates the causal mechanisms that link these ideas to policy outcomes. By developing a concept that captures these thoughts and by evaluating its plausibility, this study intends to make a contribution to both aims. It explicitly combines political actors, via the concept of leadership, and the role of political ideas, by asking how leaders make use of ideas in order to achieve far-reaching reforms even against the odds of institutional and political obstacles.

On a more general conceptual note, an explanation that considers both agency and ideas also goes some way towards seeing them both as determinants of policy outcomes. Indeed, some authors have pleaded for the influence from both interests and ideas to be considered instead of treating them as rival explanations (cf. Gibson and Fiedler 2000). Indeed, to ask whether either interests or ideas are the chief determinants of policy outcomes may be a misleading way of addressing the issue, because it neglects the possibility that the interaction between them is what counts. In the same vein, Ross has argued that ‘two alternative, mutually consistent forces driving welfare restructuring are ideas and interests’ (Helms 2000: 24). She argues that a combination of the two factors is slowly receiving more attention, as the disadvantages of exclusively structural (institutional and interest-based) explanations become clearer. However, to achieve changes on the political agenda, individuals need ‘to grab new ideas and promote them’ (ibid: 25). Furthermore, an integration of ideas and agency can help to advance knowledge about the role of ideas in policy-making, if better research methods are developed to evaluate the impact of ideas. For instance, in order to demonstrate that ideas matter as an independent variable, one should try to see whether it is possible to establish and demonstrate connections between ideas held by individuals and/or groups and the decisions ultimately made by political actors (Sabine 1973: 22). More recently, Béland (2005) has argued that institutionalist scholars may pay greater attention to ideational processes without abandoning their core assumptions, as policy ideas may matter in and beyond agenda-setting processes. At the same time, he stresses that further research on the role of ideas in social policy should develop methods ‘to evaluate the concrete influence of ideas on welfare state politics’(Helms 2000: 14). In response to such calls for the integration of ideas and interests in explanatory models and improved methods for gauging the influence of ideas, this study makes a contribution in both respects: on a conceptual level, by considering how to combine agency with ideas in the IL concept, and by devising a research design to evaluate its impact. 2.2.3 Ideational Leadership: Reform-Oriented Leadership Plus the Role of Ideas in Policy- Making

IL is about leadership achieved with the help of ideas. Before going into its meaning in more depth, a general definition may be key policy-makers who use strategies that are idea-based (“ideational”), and purposively aim for the achievement of change, even in view of institutional and electoral challenges (“leadership”). The concept of IL describes a certain resource of key policy-makers that helps to transform the resistance of reform opponents against reforms into acceptance (or at least neutrality) towards a particular reform initiative. In this fashion, the presence of IL can plausibly be linked to the adoption of structural reform in policy areas belonging to the welfare state. More specifically, IL is conceptualized as a cluster of abilities of key policy makers, including 1) to expose drawbacks of old policy principles and policies built on them; 2) to make consistent efforts to legitimize new principles and policies (using cognitive and normative arguments), 3) to frame reform resistance as problematic for societal welfare (and

Ideational Leadership

possibly for the interests of lobbyist groups, in terms of their long-term welfare political influence); 4) to make efforts at political consensus-building in support of the reform initiative; and 5) to be predominantly policy-oriented. These patterns of behaviour taken together neutralize or at least decrease reform resistance by convincing opponents of the merits of new policy principles and allow the adoption of innovative reform initiatives (the aspects of IL are developed in depth in Section 2.5).

My hypothesis about IL thus associates key policy-makers’ behaviour with the concept with the occurrence of structural welfare state reforms. The different aspects of ideational leadership, when taken together, reduce the level of institutional lock-in associated with welfare state arrangements and enable structural reforms to be adopted. This hypothesised relationship between IL and structural reforms may at first sight appear tautological, if one assumes that the observation of leadership necessarily implies achieving a certain outcome (structural reforms) or if one automatically associates the term leadership with reform adoption. There may be a certain danger in making this argument, but when taking a closer look at the issue, it is largely unfounded. Tautological here refers to the danger of formulating an explanation that is true by definition and therefore not falsifiable. The aspects of IL are all formulated with a view to specifying the relationship between them and the shaping of conditions for institutional break-out, which allow structural reform to occur. However, this does not mean that the specification or definition of IL (the independent variable), “includes” structural reform (the dependent variable). In my hypothesis, IL is merely related to, but not equated to structural reform; therefore, the presence of IL in a reform process does not automatically imply a structural reform: this clearly leaves room for falsifying the hypothesis. However, my opinion is that it can only be shown by empirical study of structural reform cases whether or not key policy-makers indeed acted in accordance with the hypothesized aspects of IL and, if this was the case, whether the role of these IL-type actors could be linked to the occurrence of structural reforms.

The core concepts of the hypothesis include “key policy-makers”, which refer to those individuals who are most likely to wield ideational leadership. I consider them to be senior members of the executive (such as ministers and prime ministers) who are authorized to initiate or commission major reform proposals and who are able to perform as political leaders in the context of a reform process (cf. Gibson and Fiedler 2000; Helms 2000). Whether it takes one such individual or several of them to push through a far-reaching reform project is largely an empirical question, which will be answered in the empirical case studies. In addition, “reform resistance” is the sum of resistance that can be wielded against a reform proposal, mostly by formal veto power of an actor or institution, but also by other forms of visible opposition (for instance, strikes by trade unions). It stems from welfare state institutions, political institutions (e.g. parliament(s), possibly in interaction with political parties, whether governing ones or opposition parties), and societal interest groups (for instance, employers and trade unions). Finally, the term “structural reform” is used to denote major reforms. As such, it is conceptually different from incremental or stepwise reform.43

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As explained in Chapter 1, a structural reform introduces changes to one or several structural dimensions of a social policy area, i.e. its financing, benefit or management structure. The financing structure determines who pays for a certain social programme and by which mechanism payment is effected; the benefit structure combines regulations on who provides services or financial provisions (‘benefits’); the management or regulatory structure is about who is the competent body to regulate the policy field (Webber 1989) . This definition is in line with criteria for institutional reform except for excluding the ‘mode of access to benefits’ as another institutional aspect (Palier 2002).

Chapter 2