ABSTRACT
Understanding and explaining change—or alternatively, stasis—has been a challenging task within political science and policy studies. Scholars in these traditions employ a number of tools in the form of frameworks, theories, models, and lenses to analyze the interactions between political actors and the structures in which they operate. Due to the sheer complexity of the task at hand, these tools are rather complementary than contending (Peters and Pierre, 2006). In this volume, attention is focused on political entrepreneurship (PE) as an analytical lens interrogating the actions taken by political actors aimed at bringing about change. PE refers to the process that is, political entrepreneurship, as much as the actor that is, the political entrepreneur. Its nature as a metaphor and the fact that the term is borrowed from economics has implied a conceptual stretching during this disciplinary journey. All of these factors have contributed to the lack of clarity some scholars attribute to PE (see, for example, Olsson and Hysing, 2012).
