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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]