This paper examines the relationship between ideas and power. We argue that social change is caused by a combination of ideas, which are inspirational, and power, which is transformative. We illustrate the argument by examining the emergence of a sustainability policy paradigm

Faced with aging populations and especially heightened fiscal constraints, large scale pension reforms were implemented in many affluent democracies during the 1990s. Canadian reforms, by contrast, were quite modest and old age security benefits emerged largely unscathed. Drawing on the...

This paper explores the meshing of pension politics and financial investment in Canada and the U.S. during the 1990s. Drawing on the institutionalist literature, the paper focuses on the relationship between ideas, finance and institutional legacies in the debate over the reform of...

According to Paul Pierson and R. Kent Weaver, the "new politics of the welfare state" is about escaping the popular blame generated by cutbacks affecting a significant portion of the population. Although the concept of blame avoidance helps to explain the political logic of welfare state...

Writing about ideas, John Maynard Keynes noted that they are "more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else." One would expect, therefore, that political science-a discipline that focuses specifically on the nature of power-would have a healthy respect for...