Between substantive and symbolic influence: diffusion, translation and bricolage in German pension politics

Diffusion, transfer and translation literatures assume that policy ideas are conceived exogenously, while domestic perspectives such as bricolage consider policy innovations as reactivated local ideas. Cases where foreign ideas do not shape local actors’ preferences, but still feature saliently in public discourse therefore appear in a conceptual blind spot. The paper develops a distinction between the symbolic and substantive functions of foreign ideas. For the case of German pension politics it argues that foreign ideas can be causally consequential as (symbolic) framing devices, even if their underlying ideas had (substantively) long been conceived and advocated in the domestic context. The analysis finds that the foreign-frame ‘Anglo-American pension funds’—a most likely case for translation and diffusion—was initially employed by change agents to advance their longstanding preference for more financialized pension policies. During the ensuing political struggles, continuity agents successfully reinterpreted and utilized the same frame to prevent pension financialization and veneer continuity as the transfer of a foreign policy innovation in what is best described as label localization. Thinking of foreign ideas in substantive and symbolic terms specifies how ideas emerge and how they are used in political conflict, which bridges global and domestic perspectives on policy change.