Microsoft Word - Alternate Routes Vol 30, Issue 2 Final


Policy Paradigms and the Structure of the State Apparatus: Embedding 
Neoliberalism 
 
Bryan Evans1 and Marcel Goguen2 
 

ABSTRACT: This contribution explores the resilience of 
neoliberal policy ideas within the state by situating the process 
of manufacturing policy advice within the context of the 
prevailing policy paradigm. The central question informing this 
work is despite evident failure, neoliberal ideas continue to 
prevail within the state policy process. Why and how this is the 
case, despite the lived experience and evidence, is the subject 
interrogated here. While the study of conventional public policy 
tends to be presented as a technical, evidence-based discipline, 
this ignores, or at best minimizes the highly hierarchical and 
politicized nature of evidence, expertise and knowledge 
employed in the work of constructing policy.  
 
KEYWORDS: neoliberalism, policy paradigm, evidence, New 
Public Management, centralization 

 
Introduction  

This paper examines the relationship between ‘policy paradigms’ (Hall, 
1993) and the institutional structure of the state apparatus. While work on policy 

 
1 Bryan Evans is Professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration, 
Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada. Together with Stephen McBride, he is the co-editor 
of Austerity: The Lived Experience and The Austerity State. 
2 Marcel Goguen is a Ph.D. candidate in International Relations at McMaster University, 
Hamilton, Canada. His dissertation examines the methodological implications of critical 
theories of the state for the study of global finance. 
We wish to acknowledge the support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research 
Council of Canada and Dr. Stephen McBride (McMaster University), Principal 
Investigator leading a Partnership Development Grant whose generous support enabled 
part of this research. Marcel Goguen would like to acknowledge support from the Centre 
for Research in Empirical Social Sciences (CRESS) at McMaster University.  
 
 

Policy Paradigms and the Structure of the State Apparatus | 13



paradigms has produced many useful insights relating to the processes through 
which certain ideas influence the policy making process, it has thus far not 
sufficiently examined how these dynamics interact with the structure of the state 
apparatus. We thus argue that an important but still mostly unexplored 
dimension in understanding the dynamics involved in the struggle over the 
maintenance and replacement of policy paradigms is the institutional structure of 
the state apparatus and role of ‘ideational’ agents working within that. Lukes 
(2005) forwards the claim that for a process to be understood as an exercise of 
power it assumes “that it is in the exerciser’s or exerciser’s power to act differently” 
(2005, 57). This framing implies that operatives within the institution possess the 
agency to make different decisions. The broader political context in which these 
agents (exercisers) function (the paradigm) works to constrain this exercise of 
agency. 

To illustrate this broader theoretical argument, we draw on previous and 
recent interviews with government and non-government policy workers in three 
Canadian provinces to examine the ways in which changes in the structure of the 
state apparatus has shaped the mechanisms involved in maintaining the stability 
of the neoliberal policy paradigm and helped insulate it from alternative ideas. 
This article proceeds in three parts. A first section sets out the significance and 
meaning of the concept of policy paradigms for studying the power dynamics 
involved in the policy process. A second section examines the changes in the 
structure of the state apparatus associated with the emergence of NPM and the 
‘neoliberal state’. A third section examines the impact of these changes in the 
structure of the state apparatus on the dynamics involved in maintaining or 
contesting the existing neoliberal policy paradigm. 
 
Public Administration and Policy Paradigms 

Despite the ideology of technocratic neutrality having long prevailed in 
the field of public administration and the public service in most western 
democracies (Raadschelders and Rutgers, 1996; Waldo, 1948), policy making does 
not take place in a power vacuum. Contrary to the implicit view that dominates 
the field of public administration, then the ideas that come to be accepted as 
common wisdom and received knowledge in the manufacture of policy are not 
there simply as a result of having been 'proven' to be superior through a neutral 
and apolitical process wherein experts carefully weigh evidence and refine their 
understanding of (social) reality. Ideas concerning public policy and 
management, as the basic building blocks of knowledge and expertise, no matter 

14 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



how anodyne and antiseptic the packaging, are anything but technical and 
apolitical. Politically imposed deadlines usually push policy practitioners to make 
a decision without there being sufficient time to completely weigh the evidence 
(Forshey, 2005; Lidman and Sommers, 2005).  

Further, more information does not necessarily contribute to a greater 
degree of consensus on policy, partly because what constitutes evidence is 
contestable and shaped by the power dynamics of the broader political context. 
How policy problems are framed, the identification of viable solutions, what is 
deemed to be acceptable or not, what instruments are chosen, are all reflections of 
where power is located and held by which policy actors. In this process, not all 
knowledge is created equal. Specific ideas are socially and culturally embedded in 
ways making them powerful or, on the other hand, not powerful (Strassheim and 
Kettunen, 2014). As a result, some forms are privileged and are readily utilized 
while other forms become relatively marginalized, a process that makes certain 
solutions appear more credible and/or legitimate than others. The relationship 
between power and ideas in the policy process remains difficult to conceptualize 
and empirically investigate, however, partially because it can be rather hard to 
“differentiate the effects of ideas themselves from the effects of the actors who bear 
them” (Campbell, 2002, 31). 

 While interest in the impact of ideas on the policy process had been 
rather limited until the 1980s, there has since grown a significant body of literature 
examining this issue by scholars who were/are skeptical of the assumption that 
was then dominant: “that politics are driven solely by actors operating according 
to a self-interested cost-benefit calculus” (Campbell, 1998, 377). A central 
research topic within this body of work is concerned with the different ways that 
ideas can be powerful in their own right and the main factors involved in shaping 
which ideas become influential (e.g. Hirshman and Berman, 2014; Campbell, 
1998, 2002; Béland, 2005, 2009; Walsh, 2000; Carstensen and Schmidt, 2016; 
Seabrooke and Wigan, 2016).  

 In order to contribute to efforts at more precisely measuring the impact 
of ideas on the policy process, Carstensen and Schmidt (2016) have distinguished 
between three forms in which ideas can be powerful. The first is power through 
ideas, which refers to the ability of particular actors to use ideas to convince others 
of the normative value or cognitive validity of their worldview in such a way as 
they alter their beliefs about how the world works or how it should be (Carstensen 
and Schmidt, 2016, 325-6). Power over ideas concerns the ability of actors to define 
what certain ideas mean and to gather enough legitimacy around their view so that 

Policy Paradigms and the Structure of the State Apparatus | 15



they can avoid having to consider alternate definitions of the same idea or 
competing ideas. Finally, power in ideas refers to quality that certain ideas can 
possess, once they have become sufficiently widely accepted, that they end up 
“structuring thought at the expense of other ideas” (Ibid, 329). It is this dimension 
of power in ideas that we are primarily interested in this paper.  

One illustration of this ideational power is provided by Widmaier in a 
series of papers examining the impact of what he calls ‘intersubjective 
understandings’ – but which we can describe as socially and politically dominant 
ideas about how the world works – on policies meant to deal with economic crisis 
(2003), international cooperation on monetary and financial regulation (2004), 
and the relative balance of price and wage guidelines and monetary policies as the 
primary mechanism of US economic policy (2007). Widmaier’s main point is that 
in dealing with different economic crises, a central role is played by the broad 
‘intersubjective understandings’ through which policymakers construct their 
understanding of when they began, what caused them, and how best to deal with 
them (2007, 46). For example, Widmaier explains, from the end of the Second 
World War up to the 1970, dominant Keynesian ‘intersubjective understandings’ 
of inflationary crises and price fluctuations as ‘market failures’ meant that they 
could be plausibly dealt with through government intervention in the form of the 
adoption of wage and price guidelines.  

In contrast, beginning in the 1970s, neoclassical ‘intersubjective 
understandings’ of inflationary crises were caused by the failure of state policies 
so that they could only plausibly be dealt with through fiscal and monetary 
austerity (Widmaier, 2007, 47-49; 2004; 2003). This should not be taken to imply 
that material forces and events are unimportant but rather that it is only by giving 
meaning to the ‘material trends’ through the lens provided by the dominant 
‘intersubjective understandings’ of a period that policymakers can identify the 
existence of a crisis, its causes, and then ‘react’ appropriately to deal with it 
(Widmaier, 2003, 64; 2004, 450). But how should we understand and analyze the 
processes through which certain ‘intersubjective understandings’ (what we shall 
simply call ideas) come to gain the authority that enables them to structure 
“thought at the expense of other ideas”?  

One avenue could be to explore this topic through the lens of ideology 
which, as it is typically used in Marxist terms, refers to how certain ideas shape 
perceptions of the existing order to minimize the desirability of any possible 
alternative that erodes the power of the dominant class (Marx, 1932; Berman, 
2017). One particularly influential contribution to public policy that adopts this 

16 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



approach is the work of Lukes which highlights how power is exercised by 
preventing people “from having grievances by shaping their perceptions, 
cognitions and preferences in such a way that they accept their role in the existing 
order of things” (2005, 11, 28).  

However, despite proposing some useful amendments to address the 
problems of traditional work on ‘false consciousness’, Lukes’ work remains 
theoretically very close to conventional work on ideology (Hay, 1997). As a result, 
it is of limited use for our purposes as it both tends to depict ideas in an 
instrumental manner as well as leave relatively little room for a consideration of 
the agency of policy makers. Therefore, we proceed in a manner similar to Konings 
(2018, 29) who suggests that it is important to consider how we might understand 
neoliberalism “even if we assume little about the ability of capitalist elites to 
capture state institutions or the minds of policymakers”. From this perspective, 
rather than understanding state officials as being either “corrupted by private 
interests” or intellectually captured by the dominant ideology, they come to be 
viewed as being “primarily disposed to stabilize the economic system” by relying 
on a set of ideas that seemingly provides a “degree of cohesion at the level of 
practice” (Konings 2018, 29) The central question then becomes how some ideas, 
and not others, come to be understood as providing the best policy options.  

For our purposes, Peter Hall’s (1993) work on the concept of policy 
paradigms provides a useful lens through which to examine this issue. For Hall, a 
policy paradigm is “framework of ideas and standards that specifies not only the 
goals of policy and the kind of instruments that can be used to attain them, but 
also the very nature of the problems they are meant to be addressing” (1993, 279; 
Béland, 2005, 5). Broadly speaking, what policy paradigms do is form the 
background view of how the world works and the kinds of causal relations that 
exists within it and, as a result, they constrain the range of possibilities considered 
as plausible or likely to succeed by policy makers (Campbell, 2002).   

In specifying how this operated in practice, Hall distinguished his 
approach from work drawing on Heclo’s (1974) concept of ‘social learning’ in 
which policy makers were understood to be perpetually ‘fine tuning’ the design of 
their policies based on a process of accumulating evidence of past policy successes 
and failures (Hall, 1993, 277). The problem for Hall was this approach suggested 
a view of how policy-makers learned from their experiences that was insufficiently 
attentive to the power dynamics involved in struggles over how to interpret the 
meaning of past policy experiences. The concept of policy paradigms is meant to 
address this weakness by foregrounding the interpretive process through which 

Policy Paradigms and the Structure of the State Apparatus | 17



past experiences are evaluated and given meaning by incorporating them into a 
coherent account of what the world is like. From this perspective “policy 
paradigms guide learning processes through which existing policy legacies are 
evaluated and criticized” (Béland, 2009, 705). In policy construction terms, the 
concept of policy paradigm is thus useful to conceptualize the way that ideas can 
shape how a policy problem is constructed in a way that makes the problem 
intelligible, so that it can be understood by political decision makers and policy 
makers, in one way rather than another.  
 One of the primary advantages of adopting this approach in analyzing 
policy construction is that it provides the tools necessary to examine how power 
shapes the policy process beyond its manifestations in 'normal' electoral politics 
and the struggle over control of governments (Béland and Cox, 2013, 194). These 
power dynamics are most clearly visible in situations in which an established 
paradigm is challenged by a competitor; i.e. in cases of ‘paradigm shift’. In the 
original Kuhnian sense, paradigm shifts are understood to occur when the 
accumulation of anomalous evidence that cannot be convincingly included into 
the view of the world espoused by a paradigm reaches a tipping point, and the 
search begins for an alternative view of the world in which the (so-called) 
anomalies can be convincingly integrated.  
 Once this happens, once a new view of the world is discovered that can 
more convincingly integrate the ostensibly anomalous facts than the view 
espoused by the previous paradigm, then we can speak of a ‘paradigm shift’. In 
policy paradigms, however, the processes involved in paradigm shifts are more 
complicated and are crucially related to the role of power (Blyth, 2013; Henriksen, 
2013). Power plays such a central role in policy paradigm shifts because since 
“each paradigm contains its own account of how the world facing policymakers 
operates and each account is different, it is often impossible for the advocates of 
different paradigms to agree on a common body of data against which a technical 
judgment in favor of one paradigm over another might be made” (Hall, 1993, 
279). 

As a result, what is considered to be evidence and what evidence means 
is inherently contestable. Simply stated, this means that “discrediting a policy 
paradigm is a much more contested and interpretive process than the one which 
lies behind scientific refutation” (Wilder and Howlett, 2014, 187). This implies 
that (1) the process of their replacement is likely to be more social and political 
than scientific, (2) issues of competing authority are likely to be central to the 
process of (policy) paradigm shift and, (3) that “the movement from one paradigm 

18 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



to another ... is likely to involve the accumulation of anomalies, experimentation 
with new forms of policy, and policy failures that precipitate a shift in the locus of 
authority over policy and initiate a wider contest between competing paradigms” 
(Hall, 1993, 280). In supporting this view policy paradigm shifts, Blyth proposes 
that the fact that the 2007-8 global financial crisis did not cause a paradigm shift 
seems to demonstrate the strength of the this account of paradigm shifts (2013, 
206), since while the crisis represents the failure of decades of received wisdom of 
the neoclassical policy paradigm, no paradigm shift has taken place; quite the 
contrary (Quiggin, 2011; Mirowski, 2013). Thus, Blyth explains, “it is politics, not 
economics, and it is authority, not facts, that matter for both paradigm 
maintenance and change” (Blyth, 2013, 210). But how does this play out in 
practice? How do certain ideas come to exert influence on the policy-making 
process while others are marginalized?  

In exploring this issue, Widmaier’s (2016) “staged theory” of ideational 
power provides a useful starting point. In this account, ideas that were initially 
used as rhetorical instruments to defend a particular policy can sometimes take 
on “structural weight” that makes them function “at a deeper level than [mere] 
policy ideas” as the “unarticulated … background knowledge” that limit the range 
of policy options that are understood as being potentially acceptable (Widmaier, 
2016, 345). Although the process wherein specific ideas come to be embedded in 
this way is clearly shaped by power relations, once specific ideas come to be 
embedded into important institutions, they can have a significant impact on the 
manufacture of policy in their own right. 

In this process, the struggle over who gets to occupy those sites which 
really matter in interpreting events and anomalies and imposing meaning onto 
the facts is central. The work of policy takes place within ‘gated’ policy 
communities. Policy paradigms operate, are fought over, maintained or 
overturned, within specific social, material and institutional 'locations'. While 
policy expertise is distributed both in and outside of the state apparatus, policy 
decision makers, those who ultimately construct a policy, and in the process 
determine what will be done or not done and how, are employed within the formal 
state apparatus. It is here that the work of policy is conducted. This means that the 
kinds of ideas which come to form the core of policy paradigms, the role of experts 
in maintaining, transferring, and applying these ideas, and the strategies that are 
used by those seeking to foster or preclude a policy paradigm shift, are all crucially 
centered on and shaped by these locations.  

Policy Paradigms and the Structure of the State Apparatus | 19



The policy-making process is often quite unresponsive to influences 
originating outside of the specific 'locations' from which public policy is 
manufactured. Policy work, and those who conduct the crafting, insulate the 
policy function of the state apparatus from unorthodox policy alternatives. 
Alternatives are filtered out through a dense network of ideational relays 
including think tanks, consultants, and various policy entrepreneurs within or 
well-linked to the state from the outside. As a result, the composition of these 
'locations', and the social, technological, political, and institutional networks to 
which they are connected, significantly shape how policy paradigms operate. To 
borrow from Blyth’s (2013) formulation above, while it is indeed ‘politics and not 
economics’ that “matter for both paradigm maintenance and change”, an 
important aspect of this is the inherently political struggle over paradigm 
maintenance and change which is shaped by the institutional terrain. To gain a 
better understanding of the power dynamics involved in maintaining or replacing 
a policy paradigm, it is important to more closely consider not only the 
composition of the ‘locations’ within the state apparatus in which policies are 
constructed but also the specificity of their connections with the social, political 
and academic actors outside of the state apparatus. In the next section, we examine 
the relationship between the current neoliberal policy paradigm and the 
institutional structure of the post-welfare state apparatus.  
 
Transforming the Structures of the State Apparatus and the Neoliberal 
Paradigm 

The Keynesian welfare state apparatus3 emerged out of a period defined 
by the events of the Great Depression and the Second World War that had 
provoked a re-thinking of how business, labour, and government could work 
together in ensuring economic stability within the context of overall growth. 
Through these formative events, governments had “learned a great deal about the 
practical problems of macroeconomic management” and broader views 

 
3 In this paper, we use the concept of the ‘state apparatus’ in order to forestall the tendency 
to reify the state as a homogenous, unified and rational actor. The state apparatus refers to 
the administrative bureaucracies, legal systems, and military and police organizations, 
among others, that are involved in regulating social and economic relations (Miliband, 
1972). These are the “legally defined organizations that wield state authority, that is, 
organizations whose goals and modes of action are defined within the law-making process, 
and that can mobilize state force, bureaucratic, judicial and physical force to implement 
their decisions” (Gran, 1994, 65).  

20 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



concerning the role of government in the administration of the economy had 
become generally more positive (Drache, 1996, 32). The welfare state apparatus 
served this purpose as it organized political power and administrative capability 
“in an effort to modify the play of market forces” through the provision of social 
security programs such as insurance against unemployment, illness, accident, and 
old age (Briggs, 2000, 18).  Consequently, “this new system also demanded new 
institutions, a new politics, and major changes in the role of the state” (Ross and 
Jenson, 1985/86, 24). As is well documented, the Keynesian Welfare state began 
to wobble and undergo transformation through the 1980s (Alber, 1988; Peters and 
Savoie, 1993). In a context of increasing inflation and unemployment and the 
decline of both profitability and disposable income (Goldthorpe, 1984, 2), the 
welfare state slowly “unravelled” (Banting and Hoberg, 1997, 410). Its decline was 
accelerated and celebrated by Reagan and Thatcher’s ascendant brand of ‘New 
Right’ thinking which counter-posed its values of economic liberalism, 
individualism, and inequality to those associated with the postwar social contract 
of collectivism, social rights and equality (Farnham and Horton, 1996, 12).  

It was in this context that the ‘New Public Management’ (NPM) 
movement arose as the “domesticated, depoliticized version of the New Right or 
market liberal policy analysis, made somewhat more technical, consensual and 
generic” (Dunleavy, 1997, 17). The key characteristics of NPM include: 1) a shift 
in focus from inputs and processes and towards outputs and outcomes (results); 
2) a shift towards more measurement and quantification; 3) a preference for more 
specialized lean, flat and autonomous organizational forms; 4) replacing  
hierarchical relationships with contract relationships; 5) use of market or market-
type mechanisms (MTM’s) for the delivery of public services; 6) an expanded 
concern with service quality and a consumer orientation; 7) a blurring of the 
separation between the public, private and non-profit sectors; and 9) a shift in 
core values away from universalism, equity, and security and towards efficiency, 
economy, effectiveness and individualism (Pollitt, 2003, 27-28). Within this 
perspective, the proper role for government came to be redefined as one where 
the objective was to “reduce or relinquish their previous responsibilities for 
maintaining full employment and a comprehensive system of state welfare; … 
privatize public services or their delivery whenever practicable; and … reform 
their own operations in accordance with market concepts of competition and 
efficiency” (Self, 1993, ix). As such NPM “provides a label under which private 
sector disciplines can be introduced to the public services, political control can be 
strengthened, budgets trimmed, professional autonomy reduced, public service 

Policy Paradigms and the Structure of the State Apparatus | 21



unions weakened and a quasi-competitive framework erected to flush out the 
natural inefficiencies of bureaucracy” (Pollitt, 1990, 49). In this sense, NPM can 
be thought of as a transmission belt for the transfer of neoliberalism into public 
sector organizations (Spronk, 2007).  

While there are definitional debates regarding neoliberalism (Cahill and 
Humphreys, 2019, 2), it can generally be defined as a paradigm applying a market 
approach to governance and as such represents an ideological shift in the role of 
government. Harvey suggests it is a theory “proposing that human well-being can 
best be advanced by the maximization of entrepreneurial freedoms within an 
institutional framework characterized by private property rights, individual 
liberty, unencumbered markets, and free trade” (2007, 22). In policy, it manifests 
itself as market liberalization, deregulation, privatization and an erosion of worker 
and social protections (Larner, 2000). While neoliberalism is often presented as a 
force hostile to the state, actually existing neoliberalism is a paradox where the 
“state is to be simultaneously rolled back and rolled forward. Non-interventionist 
and decentralised in some areas, the state is to be highly interventionist and 
centralised in others” (Gamble, 1988, 28). This is the paradox of “centralized 
decentralization” (Hoggett, 1996, 74, 9-32).  It is necessary to centralize power in 
order to dismantle state-provided social protections and to use state power to 
advance the neoliberal project. This is the central paradox of the neoliberal state 
apparatus and it is absolutely critical to an understanding that despite the rhetoric 
of ‘rolling back the state,’ building the neoliberal state in fact requires that the state 
be reorganized as an active instrument for marketization (Gamble, 2006, 21-2; 
Harvey, 2007, 22).   

This paradox at the heart of neoliberalism manifests itself in the effects 
of NPM on structure of the state apparatus. Rather than simply diminish the state 
apparatus, therefore, NPM reconfigures the distribution of power within and 
between its component parts and its relationship to forces outside of it such as 
capital, labour and other civil society movements (Harvey, 2005, 78). More 
specifically, the implementation of market fundamentalist interventions requires 
a concentration of authority at the centre of the state. Thus, while NPM is 
identified with decentralization, that is so with respect to delivery. The assertion 
of a new managerialism within the neoliberal state apparatus renews the old 
concept of the politics-administration dichotomy by empowering managers but 
also gives greater control over policy to central agencies, the executive and the 
political arm of government (i.e. ministerial offices and staff) (Savoie, 1994).  

22 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



NPM was thus no mere effort at tinkering but rather sought a 
transformation within the public sector and the public sector’s relationship to 
government and economy and so “aims at the replacement of the traditional 
model altogether” (Hughes, 2003, 50; Clarke and Newman, 1997). The new model 
of public administration was explicitly directed at “achieving more frugal, more 
efficient…more effective…governments” (Lynn, 2006, 104). Since these views did 
not sit comfortably with the post-war state inhabited by a closely-knit set of senior 
public servants and political leaders who shared common values respecting the 
mixed economy and the welfare state (Heclo and Wildavsky, 1981, 30), it was 
necessary to co-ordinate the political/managerial resources required to overcome 
resistance (e.g. Pusey, 1991). On an ideational level, the legitimacy of the policy 
proposals espoused by NPM and proponents of the neoliberal state apparatus 
rested largely on the authority of the world view espoused by neoclassical 
economics. Economics, more so than any other social science, has been an 
exceptionally powerful academic discipline in its ability to inform public policy 
(Schneider and Kirchgässner, 2009, 324). Economists are in this respect 
“gatekeepers” occupying a strategic location for providing the theoretical 
rationale informing the allocation of public resource (Markoff and Montecinos, 
1993, 52). In addition, because of this preponderance, “(a)spects of economic 
theories and techniques become embedded in real-life economic processes, and 
become part of the equipment that economic actors and ordinary citizens use in 
their day-to-day economic interactions” (Fourcade et al., 2015, 109). As a result, 
the indirect influence of economists is often just as important as their direct 
influence in reshaping “how non-economist policymakers understand a given 
issue” (Hirschman and Berman, 2014, 780). In short, they frame problems and 
thus establish the range of policy interventions to be considered. 

Though the prominence of economics is not in itself new, the discipline 
itself has changed substantially since the end of WW2. Indeed, through the Great 
Depression and the post-war era, a “generation of Keynesian trained economists 
and policy analysts came to the fore and populated a growing state apparatus 
(Evans, 2005, 25). However, even as that paradigm wobbled, economists 
continued to work as key policy actors but with “newer ideas of economic 
management” that “now come with an impressive variety of complex and esoteric 
models of their own and require equally elaborate technical staffing” (Markoff and 
Montecinos, 1993, 43). The influence of economists assumes an intellectually 
hegemonic location of this discipline over other social sciences. The scientization 
of economics, referring to the application of empirical testing, typically by various 

Policy Paradigms and the Structure of the State Apparatus | 23



mathematical methods, provides the methodological foundation for this status as 
the ‘queen of the social sciences’. Economists have thus perceived their role as 
above sectional politics as theirs is a discipline “whose intellectual achievements 
are held to be in the refinement of beautifully abstract and highly mathematized 
models” (Markoff and Montecinos, 1993, 51).  

This scientization works to depoliticize economic policy (Dyson and 
Marcussen, 2009) and so contributes to insulating the prevailing orthodoxy from 
alternative models. More than this, scientized economics reduces the debate to 
one based on purely technical, and therefore apolitical, solutions which share the 
same assumption respecting macroeconomics. This depoliticization through 
scientization is not unique to the neoliberal state. Indeed, policy problems were 
framed by Keynesian economics as “technical questions to be solved by economic 
experts. Because the problems are understood as merely technical ones, they 
appear to be beyond the political sphere” (Wisman, 1991, 118). As a result, 
contemporary neo-classical economic theory thus function “mainly as a surrogate 
ideology for the market economy” (Keen, 2011, 4) and economists have at times 
been described as 'carriers' of the neoliberal market ideology (Evans, 2017, 226-
31).  

Despite initial rumblings that the 2007-8 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) 
would lead to a decline in the authority of economics and potential shift away 
from neoliberalism (Collignon, 2008), outside of relatively minor changes to 
prudential financial regulation, the longstanding prestige and influence of 
neoclassical economics within the policy making process has not significantly 
diminished since the GFC (Mirowski, 2013, 158; Crouch, 2011; Quiggin, 2011). 
This progressive institutionalization of neoclassical economics and its ability to 
withstand substantial opposition and empirical evidence (the GFC) suggesting 
that many of its central assumptions are flawed or simply false, finds many echoes 
with Widmaier’s (2016) ‘staged theory’ of ideational power, discussed above. 
What has so far remained largely unexamined is the role played by changes in the 
state apparatus in enhancing the stability of the neoliberal policy paradigm. In the 
next section we examine this issue by drawing on previous and recent semi-
structured interviews. 
 
The Neoliberal State Apparatus, the Centralization of Power, and the Policy 
Process 
 In many Western countries, policy often had what could be characterized 
as an 'upward' movement within state bureaucracies; with policies being 

24 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



developed in departments by public sector advisors before being presented to 
members of the executive for appraisal and decision (Evans, 2017, 10). This 
process allowed for input from various sources and included an important role 
for public sector policy analysis (Good, 2013, 213). However, the centralization of 
political control discussed above has been accompanied by a movement to 
repoliticize the state by concentrating policy making authority in specific strategic 
centres operating largely under the direct control of the executive branch (Aucoin, 
2010; Savoie, 1994). The public policy expertise upon which governments rely is 
thus increasingly centered outside of the civil service.  Public policy work becomes 
politicized as work which had been the purview of the public service is “turned 
over to … partisan policy advisors, to think tanks and to lobby firms for advice” 
(Savoie, 1993, 21-2). Policy work within the neo-liberal state is one in which 
influence over the design and manufacture of policy is now limited to a limited 
number of central actors and in which “public service advisors are either shunted 
aside or are recruited for their ‘political’ fit” (Evans, 2017, 233). Whitehall scholar 
Peter Hennessey observed of the Thatcher era that the expanding role of external 
policy advice has produced “an era when the Armani-clad minds in the penumbra 
of fad-and-fashion prone private think tanks can be preferred (especially if their 
advice comes gift-wrapped and suitably politically tinted) to that more sober, 
sometimes inconvenient fare served up by the tweed-clad minds in the career 
bureaucracy” (1997, 4-5).  This has created formidable barriers that effectively 
exclude alternative ideas from having any influence on the formal policy process.  
 For instance, in a series of interviews with Ontario government policy 
analysts and policy managers conducted in 2005, a number of themes emerged 
respecting how policy work was restructured through the 1990s and beyond. 
These themes included an observed diminishment of research capacity within the 
public service and the increasing centralization of power in the executive (Evans, 
2005, 34). In addition, the interviews identified the overt politicisation of the 
policy agenda and the decline of research and evidence in the policy process 
(Evans, 2005, 37). The decline in policy capacity was understood to be linked to 
the centralisation of power in the Premier's Office as well as the “marginalisation 
of the public service from participating in policy formulations which had been a 
central function in the post war period” (Evans, 2005, 35). Commenting on these 
changes, one former executive noted that the “OPS had lost its capacity to say 'no' 
in the Harris years” (Evans, 2005, 35). The reference to Harris being to Mike 
Harris who served as Premier from 1995 to 2002 and whose government 
pioneered the most radical and aggressive neoliberal policy agenda in Ontario’s 

Policy Paradigms and the Structure of the State Apparatus | 25



modern history. Echoing this view, one senior policy manager observed that 
senior executives have increasingly “seen their role as facilitating the political 
agenda in an expeditious 'make it so' manner without full due diligence” and that 
“decisions are made through a political filter not a technical one” (Evans, 2005, 
38). Another executive ranking informant commented on the “growing policy 
role of politicians and their 'external advisors' and the commensurate 
marginalisation of the public service” as having “moved (the public service) from 
being architects to being contractors” (Evans, 2005, 35). 

These findings are echoed by a 2012 survey of 1510 government and 
non-government policy workers in three Canadian provinces provides some 
insight into the centralized and insular nature of the policy making process. 
Survey responses revealed that approximately 30 per cent of non-government 
respondents indicated they were never invited to consult with government and 
between 6 and 13 per cent were invited on a monthly basis to engage in a policy 
dialogue. Moreover, more than 46 per cent indicated that they worked with 
government on a policy issue only after all key design issues were decided or were 
limited to an implementation role (Evans and Sapeha, 2015, 258). A related 
research project entailed 31 semi-structured interviews with government and 
non-government policy and program staff working in the immigrant settlement 
field. The interview probed the working relationship between the government and 
non-government actors in this specific field. The general view of non-government 
staff was that “policy consultations were largely predetermined … Their 
experience of policy engagement with government was often simply frustrating. 
Despite providing what they viewed as relevant information and perspectives that 
would benefit policy design, this was too often not heeded” (Evans and Shields, 
2014, 122). Interviews with 18 trade union-based researchers also struck a rather 
negative experience in dealing with government. Indeed, all informants 
“characterized the climate for labour policy advocacy as ranging from “chilly” to 
“hostile,” (Evans and Ross, 2018, 340). In addition, all experienced a decline in 
their ability to access policy makers accompanied by a “prevailing sense that the 
message was not being heard by simply putting forward evidence” (Evans and 
Ross, 2018, 340). 

These conclusions find additional support from eight more recent 
interviews, carried out in March, April and May 2018 with former and current 
public service policy advisors and senior managers whose careers were in the 
Ontario Public Service (OPS), the permanent, non-partisan governmental 
bureaucracy.  Most participants touched on the decrease in the role of expertise 

26 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



in the process and the increased prevalence of centralized top-down policy 
manufacture. Thus, one participant noted that “knowledge and expertise were 
valued more in the 1990s” but that, “over time” it had become “less valued” and 
that they felt that they had become primarily a “typist” rather than a “knowledge 
worker” (Interview 1). Another participant, having been a long-time public 
service employee (26 years), observed that during their time in government they 
had “witnessed the degradation in the use of knowledge in the policy process” 
(Interview 2). During the Peterson government (1985-1990), they noted, 
government “consulted widely with experts” and “this insight was shared and 
discussed among the policy staff” (Interview 2).  

However, this is “no longer the practice” and now things are “driven by 
political expediency” with decisions being made in the assistant deputy minister's 
office or the deputy minister's office and policy staff's job being limited to “build 
around what is given” (Interview 2). One participant admitted that they saw the 
role of knowledge and expertise in the policy process as being “generally 
perfunctory”; noting that there is an 'obvious' tendency to 'curate' “evidence to 
support a (given) policy direction” (Interview 3). This view was echoed by 
participant 4 who noted that while evidence plays a role, if it does “not support 
the political direction then we curate that evidence to align with the political 
direction” (Interview 4). Similarly, a former senior policy manager observed that 
“evidence is contestable. There are so many competing interests to weigh. For 
decision-makers evidence can then be tricky. There is a critical role for evidence 
in problem identification but then it must align with stakeholder definitions of the 
problem and their solutions to some degree. And evidence must reflect the 
priorities of the government or it will be ignored” (Interview 8).  

From this perspective, they continued, “research is not really important. 
You make the data/evidence fit the political direction” (Interview 4). They 
concluded that they had had “no experience where the evidence swayed the 
position of political leaders” (Interview 4). One participant was even more blunt 
in making this point, noting simply that ““politics trumps evidence-based policy 
making” (Interview 5). In the words of another, “political congruence was always 
more important than superior data” (interview 1). From this perspective, as two 
participants noted, policy expertise was often limited to the creation of narratives 
using data to support policy directions communicated by the central agencies or 
the minister's office (Interview 5; Interview 6). Though one participant did 
highlight a recent “push to a more evidence based approach to policy work” in the 
OPS, they did nonetheless add that the process is largely driven by political 

Policy Paradigms and the Structure of the State Apparatus | 27



decisions by elected leaders, where decisions about which policies to pursue often 
emerging out of high level meetings and, from the perspective of public sector 
employees, seemingly coming “out of no where” (Interview 7). This same 
participant did note however that the role of expertise is related to the issue area, 
with specialized forms of knowledge playing more important role in highly 
technical issues dealing with things like radiation and asbestos, but less so in 
economic policy, which is less technical (Interview 7). This supports previous 
arguments made in this direction by Hirschman and Berman (2014). 

Overall, these accounts largely supported the view that most of the 
important policy decisions were informed by political considerations and that 
direction nearly always came from the premier or minister’s office, the deputy 
minister or the assistant deputy minister or from some other central agency 
(Interviews 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, and 8). Two participants noted that the Ministry of 
Finance and the Treasury Board were the most important actors involved in 
deciding which policies were pursued (Interview 1 and 2), and that they essentially 
were the “veto point” deciding which initiatives were taken up and transformed 
into policies (Interview 2). These claims support previous findings by Blakeney 
and Borins that governments also have a tendency to only accept advice from 
public servants when it is either “consistent with the broad outlines of government 
policy” or it is in an area “where the government doesn’t have strong policy ideas” 
(1998, 49). 
  In general, these interviews support arguments in the literature about 
the increasingly centralized nature of the policy making process and the resulting 
marked decline in the role played by public sector expertise and knowledge as an 
independent driving force in the manufacture of policy. However, we would 
maintain that this does not simply imply that knowledge and expertise does not 
matter for the policy making process, nor that policy paradigms do not have an 
impact on the manufacture of policy, having been replaced by explicit and overt 
politically led direction from central agencies and the offices of ministers, deputy 
ministers, and/or assistant deputy ministers. Rather, what it does appear to 
support is the view that struggles over the content of policy paradigms in the era 
of neoliberal market states now take place in a narrower set of 'locations' than they 
did in the era of the Keynesian welfare state apparatus. The kinds of knowledge 
and expertise that matter are narrow(er than they used to be) and those that do 
not have the right characteristics or institutional origins are filtered out or not 
listened to in the (now) highly centralized locations from which policies are 
manufactured in practice.  

28 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



 What we propose is thus not only that the dominance of the neoliberal 
policy paradigm constrains policies by making some options less credible but also 
that the neoliberal state-apparatus has altered the composition and environment 
of the institutional 'locations' from and through which public policies are 
manufactured. These changes have fostered a situation in which the policy making 
process is increasingly insulated from the influence of ideas that either originate 
from outside of the very select locations from which they are usually drawn or are 
composed of content that goes against the core ideas of the neoliberal policy 
paradigm. This has important implications for how we understand the causal 
mechanisms underlying the change or stability of policy paradigms. For instance, 
it implies that the process of overturning and/or replacing current (neoliberal) is 
not simply a matter of achieving electoral success.  
 The central ideas of the neoliberal policy paradigm appear to have 
become sufficiently embedded that it is often politically expedient for successive 
governments to draw on it when manufacturing their policies even when they 
might genuinely desire adopting alternative policies. In many cases there are 
actually mechanisms in place, like credit rating agencies for example (Sinclair, 
2004), that push against the incorporation of alternative or counter-hegemonic 
ideas into the highly centralized location from which policies are manufactured. 
This can mean that governments seeking to draw on alternative or heterodox 
ideas can find themselves being coerced or pushed in various ways to avoid doing 
so and to stick with ideas from the dominant policy paradigm This also means 
that focusing attention on changing the beliefs of public sector experts is likely to 
meet with only limited results since for the most part ideas that are popular 
outside of the centralized locations in which policies are manufactured tend to not 
be allowed to cross these important boundaries.  
 
Conclusion 
 Here we have explored the relationship between policy paradigms and 
changes in the structure of the state apparatus. It is argued that an important, but 
mostly unexplored dimension in understanding the dynamics involved in the 
struggle over policy paradigms, is the institutional structure of the state within 
which they are embedded. Through this, we sought to contribute to the 
development of a better understanding of both the role of expertise in the 
manufacture of policy as well as the broader relationship that exists between 
policy paradigms and the institutional structure of the state apparatus within 
which the policy process is embedded. Thus we argue that transformations in the 

Policy Paradigms and the Structure of the State Apparatus | 29



structure of the state apparatus within which the manufacture of policy is 
embedded appears to have altered the role played by expertise and knowledge in 
the policy process. The shift in policy paradigms (from Keynesianism to 
neoliberalism) that led to significant changes in the structure of the state but also 
altered the ground on which struggles over policy paradigms takes places.  
 
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