When Ideas Trump Interests: Preferences, World Views, and Policy  Innovations

Dani Rodrik

Working Papers from eSocialSciences

Abstract: The contemporary approach to political economy is built around vested interests -- elites, lobbies, and rent-seeking groups which get their way at the expense of the general public. The role of ideas in shaping those interests is typically ignored or downplayed. Yet each of the three components of the standard optimization problem in political economy – preferences, constraints, and choice variables – rely on an implicit set of ideas.  Once the manner in which ideas enter these frameworks is made explicit, a much richer and more convincing set of results can be obtained. In particular, new ideas about policy—or policy entrepreneurship—can exert an independent effect on equilibrium outcomes even in the absence of changes in the configuration of political power. [BREAD Working Paper No. 403].

Keywords: ideas; interests; political economy; policy innovation; policy entrepreneurship; lobbies; political power (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-11
Note: Institutional Papers
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.esocialsciences.org/Download/repecDownl ... &AId=5558&fref=repec

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ess:wpaper:id:5558

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from eSocialSciences
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Padma Prakash ().