Recent explanations of transformations of macroeconomic policy under crisis conditions spotlight the intrinsic properties of ideas and the persuasiveness with which they are marketed. Bridging the divide between power and discourse approaches, this article reveals the causal role played by the power resources of expert ideational entrepreneurs, conditional on the political conjuncture in which they operate. The authors exploit a fortuitous natural experiment from the early 1980s, when the Israeli economy spiraled into hyperinflation. Two similar proposals for economic stabilization and reform were offered by different teams of economists, less than two years apart. While the government rejected the dollarization plan, its authorization of the stabilization plan inaugurated a new political-economic regime. This case, in which similar programs were advocated by different ideational entrepreneurs in a largely stable institutional and economic context, makes it possible to pinpoint why radically new ideas succeed or fail. Previously underutilized analytical tools are employed to conceptualize the power of idea carriers, at both the individual and the group level.

How do institutions transform? To answer that question, this article introduces a dynamic theoretical framework of gradual institutional changes. Instead of looking at each mode of gradual change—like layering or drift—as a stand‐alone process, we examine how the application of one mode of change affects the opportunities of change agents to induce additional modes of gradual transformation. We first point to the fact that any single mode of change produces a real but limited transformation. Nevertheless, since the application of a gradual mode of change alters the institutional context, it opens new change opportunities by affecting the support in the targeted institution and/or its internal coherence. Consequently, change agents who aspire to comprehensive transformation will be able to use these new opportunities to implement additional modes of gradual transformation. Two case studies of gradual social policy transformations in Israel exemplify these theoretical assertions.

Economists are by many accounts the most influential group of experts in contemporary political decision‐making. While the literature on the power of economists mostly focuses on the policy ideas of economic experts, some recent studies suggest that economists also hold particular technocratic ideas about the policy process. The article systematically tests this argument. Focusing on economists within government bureaucracy, the study is based on a quantitative analysis of a large‐scale survey of Norwegian ministerial civil servants. It finds that economists are more likely to hold technocratic role perceptions than officials with other educational backgrounds only if they work in the finance ministry or in higher administrative grades. The findings contribute to scholarship on the political sway of economists and to debates about technocracy and the technocratic views of civil servants.

Liberal economists are known to be one of the driving forces behind economic liberalisation in various countries, but how did they become so politically influential? Constructivists generally suggest that during economic crises liberal economists persuaded decision-makers to adopt pro-market policy ideas as solutions for economic turbulence. While this answer is true, it is also only partial because it disregards the role played by governance-related ideas and institutional entrepreneurship in the political actions of liberal economists. I argue that ideas regarding decision-making mechanisms provided liberal economists with the basis for creatively exploiting pre-liberalisation institutions, such as central banks and central budget offices, through which these economists enhanced their long-term political influence. An in-depth examination of a paradigmatic case of economic liberalisation driven by liberal economists -Israel's Stabilisation Plan -exemplifies that argument. The existence of like-minded economists and similar pre-liberalisation policy-making institutions in many other countries hints that the Israeli experience is not unique.

This article offers an institutional explanation for the strikingly similar configuration of macroeconomic policy responses of advanced capitalist economies to the Great Recession. In recent decades, advanced economies have adopted a common structure of macroeconomic governance, which organizes macroeconomic policymaking around monetary policy operated by autonomous central banks and sets limits on politicians’ policymaking discretion. During the Great Recession, this macroeconomic governance allowed central banks to enact unconstrained monetary expansion and governments to enact constrained fiscal expansion. The argument here is empirically substantiated by focusing at how macroeconomic policies in response to the Great Recession have evolved in Australia and Sweden, as well as by looking at parallel developments in the United Kingdom and the United States.