ABSTRACT
The economic ideas that shape policy decisions or the functioning of markets are cultural artefacts developed through the transnational encounter of core and peripheral elites. This chapter provides the theoretical development of political science research on the spread of these economic ideas across national policy jurisdictions. Its main thesis is that the understanding of diffusion as a staggered process linking innovation and domestic adoption is problematic and should be either reformed or replaced with the more reflexive and dynamic concept of translation. One caveat is in order: the structure of ideas matters for translation because translation is not constraint-free. Elements of competing economic ideas can be blended into local translations only as long as they do not challenge the fundamental goals of the paradigm. In political economy, transnational diffusion is narrowly understood as the process whereby a decision to adopt a policy innovation in one institutional setting is influenced by the pre-existing policy choices made in other policy settings.
