The power of economic ideas – through, over and in – political time: the construction, conversion and crisis of the neoliberal order in the US and UK. Issue 3 (15th March 2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Widmaier, Wesley
• Is Part Of: Journal of European public policy. Volume 23:Issue 3(2016)
• Page Start: 338
• Page End: 356
• Publication Date: 2016-03-15
• Subjects: Crises -- discursive institutionalism -- Keynesianism -- macroeconomic policy; European Union countries -- Politics and government -- Periodicals; Political planning -- European Union countries -- Periodicals; Politique publique -- Pays de l'Union européenne -- Périodiques; Pays de l'Union européenne -- Politique et gouvernement -- Périodiques; 361.61094
• DOI: 10.1080/13501763.2015.1115890
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1350-1763

Abstract

ABSTRACT: In recent years, scholarly concern for 'great transformations' has yielded to a stress on 'gradual transitions'. In thiscontribution, I offer a discursive institutionalist model of the shifts in ideational power which drive order construction, consolidation and crisis. First, I argue that leaders exercise rhetorical power through ideas, employing communicative appeals to shape principled beliefs. Second, I argue that élites employ epistemic power over ideas to consolidate intellectual consensus. Finally, I posit that as structural power in ideas assumes a life of its own, this breeds overconfidence and crisis. Empirically, I then track the development of the neoliberal order over Reagan's and Thatcher's use of power through ideas in constructing principled restraints on the market power of labour, Clinton- and Blair-era efforts to concentrate power over ideas in central banks, and the structural power of New Keynesian ideas that obscured concentrations of financial power, culminating in the global financial crisis.