Translating travelling ideas: The introduction of unemployment insurance in Turkey

Abstract

The policy transfer/learning framework provides clues about the ideational sources of new institutional components such as the new unemployment insurance (UI) programme in Turkey. Yet it is not clear how ideas produced by transnational actors within different networks are conveyed to the national political landscape by transnational and/or domestic actors, and how these ‘travelling ideas’ are then operationalized at the national level. How do international organizations (IOs) get involved in the translation of travelling ideas, such as those which informed the design of Turkey’s UI scheme, into the national landscape? How did the domestic actors articulate and modify the ideas of IOs during the institutionalization process of Turkey’s UI programme? This article suggests that the ‘translation’ concept can provide further insights into better understanding the interaction between IOs and domestic actors that occurred during the introduction process of the UI scheme in Turkey.