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

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).