Publications

As consistent critics of neoliberalism, Radical Left parties have enjoyed a unique political position after the 2008 financial crisis. One main factor affecting these parties’ electoral success was whether they adopted more “flexible” political strategies and discourse that could appeal to a broader audience of voters. That raises the question of why only some Radical Left parties have adopted a “flexible” strategy while others have not. This article develops a novel theoretical framework to answer this question, arguing that the strategic choices of Radical Left parties were affected by a set of external conditions - primarily the severity of social and economic conditions and the features of political competition - and internal features - primarily ideological heritage and the degree of party leadership autonomy. Empirically, those findings are based on an extensive in-depth comparative analysis of six Radical Left parties in three countries: Denmark, France, and Spain.

The doubtful tendencies of neoclassical economics towards labour market intervention put it at odds with trade unions, whose raison d’etre is worker protection through de-linking compensation from market dynamics. Therefore, the recent ‘economic professionalisation’ of the Histadrut, Israel's main Labour Federation, is puzzling. Against economists’ traditional involvement in unions, in advisory roles and macro-level policymaking, Histadrut economists have gained a pivotal position in micro-level collective bargaining. What drives such economic professionalisation of trade unions, and what are its consequences? We argue as their traditional power resources have weakened and industrial relations have become highly complex, unions rely on professional economists as an alternative power resource. In the Histadrut, whose political-economic position has transformed dramatically, economic professionalisation was accompanied by other novel strategies of union revitalisation. We also argue union empowerment through economic professionalisation nurtures within them a particular approach to collective bargaining, characterised by depoliticised view of industrial relations and ‘market-friendly’ tendency in collective agreements.

This review essay takes stock of the recent literature about the role of ideas in social policy, with a particular focus on a key issue in social policy research: the changing interactions between states and markets over time. Specifically, our aim is to examine how the ideational literature discusses and explains prominent contemporary social policy evolutions: the rise of social investment and the financialization and technocratization of the welfare state.  This is done based on the scholarship on state/market interactions and on the role of ideas in social policy, and by utilizing key insights of scholars of ideational influences on state/market interactions. The article ends with a short agenda for future research on ideas and discourses as a crucial factor in the evolution of the welfare state as a key space in which states and markets interact.

Following the 2008 financial crisis, policymakers in advanced economies employed unconventional economic interventions that were meant to be short-term but continued for more than a decade and were followed by unconventional interventions in non-financial markets. What causal mechanisms connect short-term unconventional interventions with long-term policy change? By developing a constructivist-evolutionary framework, we suggest that employing unconventional policy ideas for the sake of securing the pre-crisis growth regime, in a volatile economic environment, has repeatedly failed policymakers’ expectations. The gap between expectations and outcomes expanded the policy space for unconventional policy ideas, and activated an evolutionary process, through which expanding ‘temporary’ interventions have been adopted in additional areas, became hard to reverse and modified macroeconomic priorities. A comparative process-tracing analysis of two case studies – the UK and Israel – demonstrates how short-term employment of innovative policy ideas and long-term change in economic policy are tightly connected via causal ideational evolutionary mechanisms.

We offer a novel conceptualization of government credibility and a new framework for analysing the institutions that governments constitute to enhance their credibility. While the literature commonly pertains to government credibility institutions as an apolitical instrument of ‘good government,’ we argue that there are ‘varieties of government credibility’ and therefore political trade-offs between different credibility-enhancing institutions. To demonstrate this, we introduce ‘social credibility’ as an additional type of government credibility alongside the widely-discussed ‘market credibility.’ Through historical cases, we show that social credibility institutions played a crucial role in constructing social security and point at fundamental tensions between market credibility institutions and social credibility institutions. Therefore, instead of focusing on the supposedly apolitical question of how to enhance government credibility, research should concentrate on the very political issue of how prioritizing certain types of credibility affects others and their associated institutions.

The macroeconomic policies of advanced economies during the Great Recession were characterised by a curious mixture of unconventional market interventions executed through depoliticised governance structures. We explain this phenomenon by developing a theoretical framework that focuses on the ideational and institutional influence of government-related economic ideas by combining insights of constructivist institutionalism and historical institutionalism. Specifically, we argue that the dominant government-related idea of ‘policy credibility’ – the need to convince markets of government commitment to refrain from ‘politicised’ interventions – was crucial for the adoption of depoliticised macroeconomic interventionism. The ideational dominance of ‘policy credibility’ and its pre-crisis institutionalisation enabled significant policy interventions as long as depoliticised decision-making was maintained and consolidated. We demonstrate this argument through a comparative in-depth analysis of monetary and fiscal policy in two very different cases among advanced economies – the UK and Israel.

Expanding financialisation of the economy and society represents a constitutive feature of the neoliberal regime. This process is also underway in various domains of state action, including the welfare state. This article uses a case study of financialisation of a cash transfer programme – the establishment of the Israeli ‘Saving for Every Child’ programme – to tackle two main questions: Which political constellations are likely to promote financialisation in social policy? And, what are the ramifications of financialisation for the politics of the welfare state? The study suggests that in a context of conflict between redistributive demands and opposition to the decommodifying effects of universal cash benefits, financialisation provides a political solution which satisfies the former while subordinating it to principles of commodifying social investment. The study further indicates that the financialisation of redistributive policies changes the politics of the welfare state by making financial market actors and considerations an integral part of welfare policy-making processes

Economists are by many accounts the most influential group of experts in contemporary political decision-making. While the literature on the power of economists mostly focuses on the policy ideas of economic experts, some recent studies suggest that economists also hold particular technocratic ideas about the policy process. The article systematically tests this argument. Focusing on economists within government bureaucracy, the study is based on a quantitative analysis of a large-scale survey of Norwegian ministerial civil servants. It finds that economists are more likely to hold technocratic role perceptions than officials with other educational backgrounds only if they work in the finance ministry or in higher administrative grades. The findings contribute to scholarship on the political sway of economists and to debates about technocracy and the technocratic views of civil servants.

The realisation of some neoliberal reforms depends on the public’s behaviour. Given that, how do neoliberal elites operate to advance behavioural changes in the public? This question is particularly acute for neoliberals, who concurrently emphasize individuals’ ‘right to choose’ and their obligation to ‘make the right choice’. While the literature commonly focuses on either ideational persuasion or on practice-based measures (nudge), this paper identifies an additional instrument: the construction of ‘model experiences’ – experiences that provide common citizens with a model for their future behaviour. By constructing model experiences, neoliberal elites aim to influence mass behaviour on two interrelated levels: first, through the practical training offered by the experience itself, and second, through the wider lessons that can be conveyed to the participants who reflect on the experience. We illustrate this argument with a case study of a model experience of household financialisation: Israel’s Saving for Every Child program.

What explains the continued political influence of economists, particularly after the 2008 financial crisis? The two commonly cited factors—professional authority and ideational persuasiveness—might seem inadequate as the financial crisis undermined both. This article focuses instead on how the institutionalization of neoliberal ideas of government (NIGs) politically empowered economists before 2008 and supported the preservation of their power afterwards. NIGs are economic theories of authoritative decision-making processes which link economic malaise to democratic political organization and offer prescriptions for rationalization through depoliticization of economic policy-making. Their institutionalization, following the economic crises of the 1970s and 1980s, empowered economists and reflected a transformation in their role in government, from policy experts to policy-makers. While the 2008 crisis has weakened economists’ professional authority and ideational persuasiveness, it has not impaired the institutionalization of their pivotal policy-making position. An historical examination of the Israeli community of economists illustrates this argument.

How do institutions transform? To answer that question, this article introduces a dynamic theoretical framework of gradual institutional changes. Instead of looking at each mode of gradual change—like layering or drift—as a stand-alone process, we examine how the application of one mode of change affects the opportunities of change agents to induce additional modes of gradual transformation. We first point to the fact that any single mode of change produces a real but limited transformation. Nevertheless, since the application of a gradual mode of change alters the institutional context, it opens new change opportunities by affecting the support in the targeted institution and/or its internal coherence. Consequently, change agents who aspire to comprehensive transformation will be able to use these new opportunities to implement additional modes of gradual transformation. Two case studies of gradual social policy transformations in Israel exemplify these theoretical assertions.

Various influential studies demonstrate the political power of mechanisms of gradual institutional change, such as layering, drift and conversion, in overcoming the pressures of institutional continuity and driving major policy reforms and welfare-state reforms in particular. This article contributes to this body of work by focusing on the inherent possibilities for political contestation that such gradual change mechanisms are likely to generate. The authors argue that characteristics of gradual change mechanisms – their long duration, cumulative character and the presence of pre-change institutions – are likely to enable the opposition of ‘continuity agents’ and provide them with political opportunities to stall or even reverse gradual institutional changes. The authors demonstrate these theoretical assertions through an in-depth study of two gradually implemented welfare-state reforms in Israel: the welfare-to-work reform, which was eventually reversed by its opponents, and the privatization of housing for people with intellectual disabilities, which has been stalled by its adversaries.

This article offers an institutional explanation for the strikingly similar configuration of macroeconomic policy responses of advanced capitalist economies to the Great Recession. In recent decades, advanced economies have adopted a common structure of macroeconomic governance, which organizes macroeconomic policymaking around monetary policy operated by autonomous central banks and sets limits on politicians’ policymaking discretion. During the Great Recession, this macroeconomic governance allowed central banks to enact unconstrained monetary expansion and governments to enact constrained fiscal expansion. The argument here is empirically substantiated by focusing at how macroeconomic policies in response to the Great Recession have evolved in Australia and Sweden, as well as by looking at parallel developments in the United Kingdom and the United States.

In February 1962, the Israeli government put in place a far-reaching economic liberalization reform. Had it been implemented as designed by the economists at the Bank of Israel and the Ministry of Finance, the plan could have dramatically changed Israel’s political-economic structure. Yet the plan’s actual implementation was limited and partial, with the result that economic liberalization was postponed for two further decades. This article examines the political dynamics through which Israeli economists tried to persuade political decision-makers to adopt the New Economic Policy and assesses the political obstructions that organized workers, employers, and the Ministry of Trade and Industry utilized in order to prevent its implementation. This analysis reveals the real yet limited political power that Israeli professional economists possessed in the 1960s, as well as the limits binding the power of the state with regard to organized economic interests.

Liberal economists are known to be one of the driving forces behind economic liberalisation in various countries, but how did they become so politically influential? Constructivists generally suggest that during economic crises liberal economists persuaded decision-makers to adopt pro-market policy ideas as solutions for economic turbulence. While this answer is true, it is also only partial because it disregards the role played by governance-related ideas and institutional entrepreneurship in the political actions of liberal economists. I argue that ideas regarding decision-making mechanisms provided liberal economists with the basis for creatively exploiting pre-liberalisation institutions, such as central banks and central budget offices, through which these economists enhanced their long-term political influence. An in-depth examination of a paradigmatic case of economic liberalisation driven by liberal economists – Israel's Stabilisation Plan – exemplifies that argument. The existence of like-minded economists and similar pre-liberalisation policy-making institutions in many other countries hints that the Israeli experience is not unique.

Recent explanations of transformations of macroeconomic policy under crisis conditions spotlight the intrinsic properties of ideas and the persuasiveness with which they are marketed. Bridging the divide between power and discourse approaches, this article reveals the causal role played by the power resources of expert ideational entrepreneurs, conditional on the political conjuncture in which they operate. The authors exploit a fortuitous natural experiment from the early 1980s, when the Israeli economy spiraled into hyperinflation. Two similar proposals for economic stabilization and reform were offered by different teams of economists, less than two years apart. While the government rejected the dollarization plan, its authorization of the stabilization plan inaugurated a new political-economic regime. This case, in which similar programs were advocated by different ideational entrepreneurs in a largely stable institutional and economic context, makes it possible to pinpoint why radically new ideas succeed or fail. Previously underutilized analytical tools are employed to conceptualize the power of idea carriers, at both the individual and the group level.

The book is the first to cover all areas of privatization in Israel and one of the first to do so in general, including state infrastructure, immigration policy, land, health, education, welfare, regulation, and policy design. As such, it offers a comprehensive volume for students, policy makers, and scholars interested in the economic, sociological, political, and legal perspectives of a major policy trend that has changed the face and character of the modern state. In addition, it is a vital contribution to those who have an interest in changes in Israeli society, politics, and economy.

Welfare state reform is a topic that has attracted growing attention from scholars interested in the role of ideas as a possible explanation for social change and stability. In this chapter, we map more than two decades of ideational contributions to the scholarship on welfare state reform. The chapter begins with a discussion of the “ideational turn” before turning to ideational typologies, ideational forms of institutionalism, and ideational research on incremental yet transformative policy change. This is followed by a critical assessment of the recent scholarship on the role of ideas in welfare state reform, which has shaped key research debates about social policy change, from the work on the neoliberal justification of welfare restructuring to the literature on the social investment paradigm. By focusing on the different ways in which ideational factors can explain welfare state reform, our analysis shows that scholars working on the role of ideas have durably impacted research on welfare state reform over time. The final section provides a concise outlook for current and future ideational research on welfare state reform by stressing three key issues: the COVID-19 pandemic, the potential implications of AI for social policy, and the relationship between welfare and environmental risks. 

Over the last two decades, a growing number of scholars have written about the role of ideas in social policy development and have demonstrated how ideas such as citizenship, solidarity, and personal responsibility have influenced the construction of social security institutions as well as the privatization and retrenchment of the welfare state (eg Béland, 2016; Béland and Petersen, 2014; Blyth, 2002; Campbell, 2004; Jacobs, 2009; Mehta, 2011; Orenstein, 2008; Padamsee, 2009; Schmidt 2011; Somers and Block, 2005). Yet, the study of ideas in social policy is not as widespread as it should be, in part because this topic has yet to become central to mainstream social policy teaching. This is related to the fact that too many scholars, including university teachers, see “ideas” as an overly abstract construct that cannot be investigated empirically in a straightforward and rigorous manner. In this chapter, we explain why ideas in social policy can be defined and studied empirically before discussing key topics students should learn about and, finally, pedagogic strategies we discovered over the years to teach ideational analysis at both the undergraduate and the graduate level.

Together, we wrote this chapter based on our experience of teaching about the role of ideas in undergraduate and postgraduate classes on the politics of social policy, public policy, and comparative political economy, which we hope will help university teachers to consider ideas in their social policy teaching while discovering ways to explain what ideas are and how they might matter to their students. The first main part of the chapter discusses the nature and scope of ideational research as well as reasons why students of social policy should pay more attention to them. The second main section identifies the most important elements of the ideational literature to teach and learn about in social policy courses. Finally, the last main section discusses strategies we have used to teach ideational research at both the graduate and the undergraduate level.

Israel’s political economy has been transformed since the 1980s from a developmental to a neoliberal model. This chapter describes and explains this transformation, emphasizing the unevenness and incompleteness of liberalization and its impact on socioeconomic inequality. Adopting a historical-institutionalist perspective to explain both the rise of Israeli neoliberalism and its unevenness, the chapter argues that liberalization was led by economic technocrats in state agencies, who were guided by liberal economic ideas and simultaneously pursuing their interest in greater authority and autonomy. The technocrats were empowered by re-engineering economic policy institutions and cooperating with other political actors. However, their ability to fulfill the goal of technocratic management of a competition-driven economy was limited by the continuing power of some sectors of both business and labor and the continuing vibrancy of the state’s national and military projects. The conclusion discusses recent challenges to neoliberalism in Israel as a result of public discontent and conflict between state actors.

Privatization in Israel constitutes a major institutional transformation. This chapter employs historical institutionalism and discursive institutionalism to reveal the political conditions and factors that facilitated Israeli privatization and the processes through which the various dimensions of privatization have been taking place. Accordingly, the analysis focuses on how political and economic crises, neoliberal ideas, and gradual change processes like institutional layering and drift have, together, contributed to the consolidation of privatization as a central policy practice in contemporary Israel. The chapter concludes by briefly discussing the political possibilities for, and hurdles facing, a future retreat from privatization policy in Israel.

This chapter examines the role that professional Israeli economists, mainly located in academia, the Ministry of Finance (MoF), and the Bank of Israel (BoI), played in Israel’s neoliberal transformation. Various political and sociological studies point to the crucial role liberal economists played in the global paradigmatic shift toward neoliberalism, both as a community of professionals and as individual political entrepreneurs. In these studies the transformation of economists’ ideas from “Keynesian” or “developmental” to “neo-classical” provided the “instruction sheet” for neoliberal institutional change. I show in this chapter that the influence of Israeli economists had on local political–economic regime shift exemplifies well the political role of economists in other cases, as purveyors of the economic ideas on which liberalization was based. However, in Israel the main transformation standing behind the paradigmatic shift toward economic liberalization was not in economists’ ideas as such, which even in the 1950s exhibited a strong liberal commitment. Rather, it was their political influence within the state which had gradually increased over the years and reached a crucial peak at the height of an economic crisis. Behind the political strengthening of Israeli economists firstly stood longterm structural and institutional changes, which gradually eroded the power of “political” economic governance and opened the floor for greater involvement of professional economists and the statutory state agencies in which they have operated, namely the MoF and the BoI. This long-term trend was joined and reinforced by economists’ ability to act as effective political entrepreneurs in the height of the economic crisis of the

This chapter examines the relationship between two old left-of-centre parties and a centre-right party with trade unions federations in Israel, as well as the political and economic changes that led to the current state of affairs. For many years, there were very close ties between the old left parties and the main labour federation. In recent decades these ties have significantly diminished. A symbiotic organizational linkage has been replaced by mainly ad hoc links between unions and parties and personal links between union leaders and national politicians.