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AbstractWhat 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.

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.

AbstractEconomists 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.

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.