Breaking promises and raising taxes: rhetorical path dependence and policy dysfunction in time. Issue 4 (1st October 2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Widmaier, Wesley
• Is Part Of: Australian journal of political science. Volume 51:Issue 4(2016)
• Page Start: 727
• Page End: 741
• Publication Date: 2016-10-01
• Subjects: Rhetoric -- crisis -- leadership -- historical institutionalism -- discursive institutionalism; Australasia -- Politics and government -- Periodicals; Political science -- Periodicals; 320
• DOI: 10.1080/10361146.2016.1238871
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1036-1146

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Where historical institutionalists have stressed the path-dependent efficiencies that stabilise policy orders, their rationalist assumptions have increasingly obscured the scope for instability. To redress such oversights, I integrate historical institutionalist insights regarding incremental change with discursive institutionalist analyses of interpretive tensions in a way that accords with Daniel Kahneman's analyses of shifting 'fast'/principled and 'slow'/cognitive biases. The resulting framework posits that initial principled constructions of policy ideas are undermined where their subsequent 'intellectual conversion' limits flexibility and legitimacy. Empirically, I contrast the practices of George HW Bush and John Howard, as each broke anti-tax promises. Bush's intellectual justifications undermined his credibility, but Howard's principled justifications enabled his success. This analysis has implications for theories of institutional agency and dysfunction.