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Can You Recognize a Paradigm When You See One? Defining and Measuring Paradigm Shift

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Book cover Policy Paradigms in Theory and Practice

Part of the book series: Studies in the Political Economy of Public Policy ((PEPP))

Abstract

Whether as a subfield of political science or as a discipline in its own right, policy studies have come a long way since Harold Lasswell’s seminal work on the policy cycle (Howlett & Ramesh, 2003, p. 702; Sabatier, 2007; Savard & Banville, 2012). Nowadays, policy scholars use various theoretical frameworks to understand policymaking, including advocacy coalitions (Sabatier & Jenkins-Smith, 1993), multiple streams (Kingdon, 2003), and punctuated equilibrium (Baumgartner & Jones, 2009). To a significant extent, these frameworks emphasize the influence of “ideas,” for instance, worldviews, ideologies, cognitive filters, and causal beliefs, on policy change (Real-Dato, 2009). This should not come as a surprise since ideas have recently gained ascendency in social research alongside the “usual suspects” of interests, institutions, and socioeconomic conditions (Béland & Cox, 2011; Jacobs, 2015).

I wish to thank the editors, Michael Howlett and John Hogan, for their kind invitation to contribute to this volume and for their comments on this chapter. I also thank Daniel Béland for his comments on various versions of this work. This chapter is based on and extends my previous work on policy paradigms, which was mostly conducted while I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Ministère de l’Emploi et de la Solidarité sociale du Québec and at the Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy (JSGS), University of Saskatchewan Campus. Postdoctoral funding from the Fonds de recherche du Québec—Société et culture (FRQ-SC) and the Canada Research Chair on Public Policy at JSGS is gratefully acknowledged for this period.

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Authors
  1. Pierre-Marc Daigneault
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland

    John Hogan (Lecturer) (Lecturer)

  2. Simon Fraser University, Canada

    Michael Howlett (Professor) (Professor)

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© 2015 Pierre-Marc Daigneault

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Daigneault, PM. (2015). Can You Recognize a Paradigm When You See One? Defining and Measuring Paradigm Shift. In: Hogan, J., Howlett, M. (eds) Policy Paradigms in Theory and Practice. Studies in the Political Economy of Public Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137434043_3

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