1 A Glimpse of the Ideational Turn 1 Mary Jocelyn R. dela Cruz Political Science Department De La Salle University Manila The purpose of this paper is twofold: The first one is to describe the Dzideational turndz in political science, a shift that is taking place among scholars who would usually use interests as an explanatory variable to explain institutional changes to ideas to make sense of the same; second is an invitation for us in the Philippine political science academe to consider adopting this approach to formulate alternative explanations to policy process. The Ideational Turn That scholars had begun to take interest in the study of ideas for more than twenty years now indicates that analyzing the role of ideas in political changes is not entirely new. In 1984, John Kingdon asked scholars and policymakers on how do we know when an idea’s time has come; thus setting the stage for researchers to explore the role of agenda-setting in public policy. The advent of constructivism in international relations can be attributed to the eventual rise of studies, which explained that the end of the Cold War was brought about by a shift in the balance of power that did not simply stem from USSR’s economic downfall or the failure of their political structures, but also because of the disillusionment in the very ideology that fueled the state as a world superpower in the first place (Hay 2002). In a similar vein, McNamara’s (1998) study indicated that the Thatcher and Reagan administrations’ championing of monetarism as an alternative to Keynesian economic policy cannot be simply explained as an alteration of public officials’ interests, but more on the shift of dominant ideas that facilitated the redefinition of their economic structures. In the expansive literature of new institutionalism, we have witnessed the long and uphill battle of rational choice institutionalists, historical institutionalists and sociological institutionalists to address the occurrence of endogenous changes despite what appears to be the persistence of rules or norms and fixity of individual preferences. Vivien Schmidt (2010) observed that during this stretch, all of the three strands have gradually appreciated that ideas play an undeniable role in institutional change, despite the fact that the acceptance to do so is markedly different for each approach. As observed by some scholars, I also argue that this transformation is the crux of the ideational turn in the discipline of political science: a turning point which opens up a box of interesting topics which I believe to be worthy of research. Schmidt (2010) noted that RCI finds the acknowledgement of ideas as the most challenging, given their preset assumptions that individual interest is the nucleus of institutions. An example of this is Goldstein and Keohane’s ȋͳͻͻ͵Ȍ treatment of ideas as performing supplementary role in making sense of institutional change – that is, as roadmaps that guide actor’s strategies, focal points for negotiating actors to arrive at a decision in the absence of an equilibrium, or as a given in an established institution. 1 Conference paper for the 2013 Philippine Political Science Association held at Mariano Marcos State University, Batac, Ilocos Norte, Philippines on 11-12 April 2013