Hypotheses and observable implications

Cornel Ban

From theory to data

Build your hypotheses on the lit review

Be explicit about the connections between the lit review and hypotheses

You can’t have just one hypothesis. Only through competition between at least two hypothesis you can begin to convince people

Hypothesis

New economic paradigms become domestically embedded through translation processes that involve both domestic and external ideational entrepreneurs.

Define key terms in the hypothesis Translation refers to the process whereby

ideational entrepreneurs called translators adapt to local conditions economic ideas invented and/or developed abroad.

The translators can be as diverse as economists, civil servants, civil society organizations, corporate holders of technoscientific knowledge or even exceptional individuals.

Define the scope conditions of the hypothesis These actors do their translation

work either through incremental interventions into policymaking, or by taking advantage of crises as critical junctures that destabilize the existing ideational and/or policy equilibria as their point of insertion.

Indicate the observable implications The challenge contained in the

analysis of translation as a process of network expansion would be to measure

-the strength, -the patterns and the outcomes of these transnational

networks over time.

Illustrate the observable implications To illustrate, in both Spain and Romania

neoliberalism was layered with ideas salvaged from the debris of local developmentalist paradigms such as notions of industrial champions and a penchant for corporatist institutions.

But at no point did Spanish or Romanian translators give up on the main goals of the neoliberal paradigm such as trade liberalization, sound finance, and FDI promotion. Nevertheless, the editing of these imported ideas with local ideas helps explain why, even after the neoliberal turn of 1982, ….