Expert ideas in institutional context – How bureaucratic structures helped shape energy policy response in the United Kingdom and France

This thesis examines the intersect of institutions and ideas during crisis. It suggests to synthesise institutional and ideational theories of change and stability in pragmatic empirical research inspired by classics of comparative politics. It emphasises a specific set of institutional parameters: Open or closed bureaucratic structures understood along three analytical dimensions: capacity of state, negotiation style and basis of expertise. These affect the way in which policy ideas can be utilized by experts. The ideational dimension is considered along three distinct aspects of policy ideas: overarching ideas, instrumental ideas and settings of ideas. The empirical contribution of the thesis is an examination of energy policy ideas of public experts in energy policy in the United Kingdom and France around the first oil crisis. The two cases represent diverse cases of variation on the causal factor of bureaucratic structures where the United Kingdom represents an open bureaucratic structure and France represents a closed bureaucratic structure. The findings of the investigation emphasise that ideas matter, but that different institutional contexts affect the ability of expert actors to form coalitions around different policy ideas. In the French case, this allowed the EDF to form ideational coalitions with shifting expert groups whereas the United Kingdom required political intervention to break the gridlock and status quo dynamics among multiple expert groups. Therefore, there is considerable insight in examining how ideas matter in a well-specified institutional context. In synthesising these two dimensions of policy change, the thesis highlights the institutional conditions for actor coalitions to form around ideas and the conditioning role the institutional environment can have for status quo policy dynamics. Furthermore, the analysis sheds light on how the role of ideas for policy during crisis may be understood as incremental and piecemeal logic rather than the erstwhile dominance of paradigmatic or punctuated shifts.