Culture in Connection: Re-Contextualizing Ideational Processes in the Analysis of Policy Development

Recent scholarship on ideational dynamics in policy development has yielded a deeper understanding of policy-making processes previously illuminated by interest- and institution-based analyses, and even more importantly, a newfound ability to account for processes and outcomes those prior approaches failed to explain. Gender scholars have made particularly strong contributions to the case that we cannot understand policy development without its cultural determinants. This new scholarship has laid a solid foundation for approaching culture, ideas, and discourses as constitutive elements of social policy, and we must now move forward to situate these causal arguments within a broader picture of policy development. This article explores four points of connection that help re-position these processes within the larger endeavor of understanding social policy formation. These are: (a) interaction between ideational and other causal dynamics, (b) the interdependence of these processes and its implications for notions of causality in policy analysis, (c) the ways contemporaneous meanings are connected with one another, which reflects the multiplicity of cultures, ideas, and discourses, and (d) the connections between these meanings and discourses across time, which are critical to instances of significant policy change. Each section also explores the empirical and theoretical scholarship on gender that helps illustrate the need to examine these connections.