I think ideology is a phenomenon that doesn’t get enough attention in the study of social, economic, and political change. I don’t think anyone believes that it isn’t important, but no one really puts a focus on it either. They much rather spend their time looking at Interests (Quadagno/Tullock) or Institutions (Skocpol/Buchanan).
Douglass North, for example, argues that “ideas and ideologies matter” but immediately follows up with “and institutions play a major role in determining just how they matter.” In The Politics of Free Markets, Monica Prasad argues that while the ideological change that occurred with the rise of neoliberalism was important, it was institutions that determined how these ideas were transformed into public policy. In my head, it looks something like this:
People have their individual interests which are shaped by ideology which in turn is shaped by state structure. It’s quite a convincing argument both theoretical and empirically. The only question left is: Where do the institutions of the state come from and how do they change? I could be wrong, but it seems like most people just fall back on a path dependency argument. I don’t think this is an adequate explanation. For example, how do we explain the differences between the state powers enumerated in the original constitution and what we have today? If state structure played the dominant role then we’d have a lot more amendments than we do.
Instead, it’s been changing ideology which better explains the outcome. Bob Higgs got it right in Crisis and Leviathan. He argues that “ideologies constrain as well as propel political action… Many potentially gratifying ends and many powerful means are patently inconsistent with a particular ideology, and therefore infeasible if not unthinkable. While ideologies serve as levers, they also function as straightjackets.” No doubt interests and institutions are still important, though if I had to reformulate those circles, I think I would switch ideology and state structure.
Anyone want to point me to some more relevant literature on the subject?
- Josh McCabe
It’s not exactly what you’re talking about, but similar IMO – have you read Sowell’s ‘A Conflict of Visions’? He talks about how these core beliefs people have about Human nature filter the way individuals see and understand the world. It’s kind of deeper though because it’s almost at the subconscious level where we don’t even realize how our ideology has all these built in assumptions. I bet you have read it, but wanted to suggest it none the less.
Robert Higgs had a paper “The Complex Course of Ideological Change” in the October 2008 issues of The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, in which he argues that the relationship between ideology and the state structure two-way. He has also drawn a schematic diagram like yours.
And McCloskey, of course, believes that ideology is fundamental to much of everything else. She has a book forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press in 2010 ” Bourgeois Dignity: Why economics cannpt explain the Industrial Revolution” in which she argues against the materialist explanations and shows the role that ideology played in bringing about that great historical episode. Parts, or maybe even all of the manuscript is available on her website.
Please pardon the many typos in the previous post. There should be a way we should be able to edit comments!
I believe you can find some treatment of ideology and institutional change (although maybe not totally supporting your insight) in Daron Acemoglu’s work, mostly in “Institutions as the Fundamental Cause of Long-Run Growth” and “Why Not a Political Coase Theorem?”. Both are avaliable on the net.
By the way, great blog!
Economic historian John Wood argues that economic theories (ideology) have little impact on government policy. Indeed the direction of causation is the reverse:
http://eh.net/bookreviews/library/1432
Thanks for all the recommendations. I guess you should be careful what you wish for… now my reading list is even longer!
I have one more for you Josh.
While Higgs’ Crisis and Leviathon may be the best empirical work on ideology, Richard Wagner’s Fiscal Sociology and the Theory of Public Finance gives the theory behind the empirics – Wagner is a true emergentist.
Chapter 3 of my book Crisis and Leviathan is titled “On Ideology as an Analytical Concept in the Study of Political Economy.” Readers will find that the content of that chapter is much more theoretical than empirical, although there as in most of my writing, I give many empirical examples as I go along. My article in the October 2008 issue of the American Journal of Economics and Sociology is also theoretical, for the most part — an attempt to build on my previous writing in this area.
When I wrote C&L, I supposed that chapter 3 would be the one of greatest interest to fellow scholars and make the greatest contribution to the ongoing debates in related areas. I was wrong. Although my general development of the crisis hypothesis and of the ratchet effect and my historical account that grew out of this development attracted a great deal of notice, scarcely anyone took note of the substance of chapter 3, much less bothered to understand my argument there. This neglect arose, I suspect, because my argument about ideological change does not fit easily into other, standard models and theories of the growth of government. Nor does it lend itself to the scientistic econometric exercises that most economists and all too many political scientists and sociologists rush to produce. In the 1980s and 1990s a huge literature appeared in economics and political science journals ostensibly about ideological change, but in nearly all cases this purported “ideological change” was nothing but an index based in various ways on roll-call voting in Congress or another legislature — an index that is problematic in many respects, but in any event has hardly anything to do with my concept of ideology and my thinking about how ideological change, social structure, and political action are interrelated.
I’m still hoping that someone will actually read my chapter 3 and my recent AJES article (which appears in somewhat different form as chapter 3 in my 2007 book Neither Liberty Nor Safety) and take my argument seriously. If no one ever does, then I shall be compelled to conclude that however successful C&L might have been overall, my attempt in that book to contribute something of substantial value to the scholarship of political economy was in large part a failure.