By Bart
Drezner (2001) proposes a concept of elite consensus as a possible driver of policy convergence occurring as a result of globalization. Although he purportedly shows that elite consensus has limited explanatory value when applied to empirical evidence on policy convergence under globalization, I believe the concept of elite consensus is worth revisiting and may have greater influence on specific contexts and for specific policy areas. Additionally, the elite consensus approach to policy diffusion could lead us to reinterpret the influence of IFIs, as discussed by Shipan and Volden, as not entirely coercive, but part of an ideational landscape in which academia also plays a central role.
Derzner explains the elite consensus approach as a network of policy experts who “share common principled beliefs over ends, causal beliefs over means, and common standards of accruing and testing new knowledge.” In this approach, the growing technical nature of problems has increased the reliance on experts and scientists for policy solutions. This is consistent with past weeks’ readings on, for example, the anti-political development machine. However, this would also explain how IFIs might having influence through their perceived expertise, rather than solely through their powers of coercion.
Following this reasoning, it seems logical to trace the source of an individual’s expertise to their credentials—in the case of officials at IFIs and other organizations, as well as governments, academic institutions, particularly those in the United States and Western Europe. For example, the United States State Department boasts that over 300 current and past world heads of state received academic degrees from universities in the United States.
However, despite what western academic institutions have in common, different disciplines display varying degrees of orthodoxy of thought, and economics in particular may have a narrower range of scope than others. One explanation for this is what Blyth (2011) calls “disciplinary incentives,” particularly within the academic field of economics. Economics is currently one of the most popular and fastest growing majors on U.S. college campuses. Students recognize that salaries in the financial sector dwarf those in most other industries, and see an economics degree as key to success. The link between academic economics and the lack of professional repercussions for real world outcomes of economic theory are problematic, according to Blyth: “Inside the academy, the costs of being wrong, in terms of external validity in the world, are negligible. Tenure is tenure and error is error; let us not confuse the two. Hedge funds run by economists blow up: Tenured economists who run hedge funds do not. Promotion depends upon tenure and that depends upon acceptance of the reigning paradigm that all the people reading your tenure file created.” Outside of the small number of U.S. heterodox economics departments, the academic field of economics may exert a disciplinary control that inhibits academic ideas that fall outside of accepted boundaries.
There may be a reason that the case studies Derzner uses to test, and ultimately cast doubt upon, the elite consensus approach are not particularly appropriate examples. Returning to a prior week’s reading, Baumagarten and Jones (1991), as quoted in Howlett, Ramesh, and Perl, say that “when they are portrayed as technical problems, experts can dominate the decision-making process. When the ethical, social or political implications of such policies assume center stage, a much broader range of participants can suddenly become involved.” Derzner uses the example of labor protections (among others) as empirical evidence on the degree to which policies are or are not converging under globalization. While for Derzner as well as most with some background in economics it is easy to see the connection between labor rights, or lack thereof, and economic competitiveness, that’s not the point that Baumagarten and Jones (1991) are making. I would argue that in many contexts the public does not see labor protections as a technical issues, to be decided by experts, but as more of a political and ethical issue, and therefore one to which the elite consensus approach is less applicable.
Blyth and Ban (2013) examine the relationship between the BRICS and the Washington Consensus from an ideational perspective. They show that the ideas of the Washington Consensus do shape policy outcomes, although after having been filtered by political and economic processes at the domestic and the international levels of analysis. In a more complicated and nuanced process than that that described by Drezner (2001), what follows is a process whereby “domestic interest groups, policy intellectuals, and other interested agents compete over different societal projects using international ideas that complicate the simple core-periphery model of the diffusion of economic ideas and institutions.” In the end, what results is not a straightforward copying of Western policies, but instead hybrids and even “mistranslations” that are a product of a processes of domestic political struggles.
In conclusion, I think Derzner does not give sufficient attention to the elite consensus approach to policy diffusion and its ideational perspective. There may be particular policies (those viewed as more technical than political or ethical) where it is more applicable than others, but the role of an elite consensus generated by the dominance of Western academic insitutions, particularly economics departments, should not be discounted as a major mechanism of diffusion of economic paradigms and related policies.
Blyth, Mark. “Paradigms and Paradox: The Politics of Economic Ideas in Two Moments of Crisis.” 2011
Ban, Cornel and Mark Blyth. “The BRICs and the Washington Consensus: An Introduction” Review of International Political Economy