What Is a Policy Paradigm? Overcoming Epistemological Hurdles in Cross-Disciplinary Conceptual Adaptation

The advent of the new institutionalism in the policy sciences has brought with it a tendency to borrow concepts from disparate fields of study (Immergut, 1998; Koelble, 1995). Though it is a discipline vulnerable to critique for embracing metaphors rather than models (Dobuzinskis, 1992; Dowding, 1995), three decades of new institutionalism has produced theories whose conceptual origins can be traced to cybernetics (Steinbruner, 1974), evolutionary biology (Krasner, 1984), seismic geology (Jones et al., 2009), anthropology (Mahoney, 2000), economics (North, 1990), and organizational theory (Agyris & Schön, 1978). From the philosophy of science, the discipline has borrowed and adapted Thomas Kuhn’s concept of paradigms to explain the dynamics of long-term policy change (Kuhn, 1962, 1970a), culminating in the routine mention of paradigms in policy journals since the early 1990s (Béland & Cox, 2013; Skogstad, 2011).