Between 1909 and 1941, the Russell Sage Foundation (RSF) was actively involved in crafting and lobbying for policy solutions to the pervasive problem of predatory lending. Using a rich assortment of archival records, I build upon political learning theory by demonstrating how institutional conditions and political pressures – in addition to new knowledge gained through scientific study and practical experience – all contributed to the emergence and development of RSF experts’ policy ideas over the course of this 30-year period. In (...) light of these findings, I suggest that policy ideas and political interests are mutually constitutive, and that the notion that ideas must be shown to operate independent of interests in order to “prove” that they matter in policymaking is misguided. Furthermore, I discuss the implications of the remarkable success of RSF’s policy proposals for current understandings of institutional change. In particular, I argue that the passage of RSF’s controversial Uniform Small Loan Law in 34 states suggests that political actors’ collective agency can produce significant policy reforms in a context of normal policymaking without the intervention of major destabilizing events. (shrink)

Seeking to explain the emergence of anti-trafficking initiatives, scholars have explored two sets of ideas—national security and gender equality—thought to shape policy. In this study, we examine whether such ideational influence accounts for Sweden's evolving anti-trafficking policy over the past decade. As powerful domestic ideas about gender inequality informed the adoption of an abolitionist prostitution policy in the 1990s, one would expect similar ideas to influence domestic responses to the related issue of cross-border trafficking.However, our case study shows that the (...) policy area of trafficking has largely followed a different ideational path. Gendered ideas, periodically nested in a human rights discourse, have been salient in the public debate on trafficking in human beings, especially during the campaign to boycott the 2006 FIFA World Cup. However, they have exerted substantially less influence on Swedish legislative initiatives to combat trafficking, with security concerns still holding sway. (shrink)

This thesis explores Vietnam’s trade policymaking to generate insights into the factors driving the country’s process of trade liberalization since the 1980s. Vietnam provides an important case for the study of the politics of trade policy, as its rapid transformation from isolation to active trade player has been one of the most dramatic of any country. As a developing country, such trade agreements require costly and highly politically sensitive policy reforms. Moreover, as a country with a one-party socialist political system, (...) its capacity to engage with the capitalist global and regional trade regimes is less than for many of its peers. This situation raises questions about how and why Vietnam has so rapidly adopted a strategy of aggressive trade liberalization through bilateral, regional and global trade agreements? (shrink)

The 1948 constitution of the World Health Organization (WHO) defines health as ‘a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’. It was a bold and revolutionary health idea to gain international consensus in a period characterized by fervent anti-communism. This article explores the genealogy of the health definition and demonstrates how it was possible to expand the scope of health, redefine it as ‘well-being’, and overcome ideological resistance to progressive and (...) international health approaches. The first part of the article demonstrates how the health definition was composed through a trajectory of draft ideas from scholars in the history of medicine, as well as political actors working to promote national health insurance. The definition was authored by League of Nations veteran Raymond Gautier, but secretly drew heavily on medical historian Henry E. Sigerist’s controversial book Socialized Medicine in the Soviet Union (1937). The second part analyses how it was possible to resist the ideological pushback against the WHO and secure US ratification. The WHO’s progressive constitution was not simply a deviation from dominant health ideas, but a direct outcome of the entrenched health conflict. The genealogy is based on original archival material from international organizations and US government archives. The article contributes to understandings of the political controversies surrounding the WHO and to scholarship on understandings of health. It also illustrates how influential health ideas cross the boundaries between politics and health sciences, as well as the boundaries between domestic health policy and global health. (shrink)

Although any typology of constructivism might be arbitrary, there are, broadly speaking, two distinctive constructivist approaches in security studies as well as International Relations (IR) according to their different meta-theoretical stances: conventional constructivism, on the one hand, and critical constructivism on the other. Indeed, regarding how to understand state identity which is integral to national security, there has meta-theoretically been fierce contention between conventional and critical constructivist security studies. In not ignoring but slightly toning down this contention operating at the (...) abstract level, this article aims to present a pragmatic application of the two different (or conflicting) constructivisms to capturing a more complete picture of state identity formation in substantive empirical research of constructivist security studies. The pragmatic approach is that, without being immersed heavily in the meta-theoretical strife between the two seemingly conflicting constructivist camps, both constructivisms should be treated as different analytical frameworks for examining different (internal and external) faces of state identity formation: the external construction of state identity can be well addressed by conventional constructivism, while the internal one by critical constructivism. In this sense, the relationship between conventional and critical constructivism can be understood as not conflicting but complementary in empirical research, as both constructivisms enrich and deepen our understanding of state identity formation in different ways. (shrink)