The Political Power of Bad Ideas: Networks, Institutions, and the Global Prohibition Wave

by Mark Lawrence Schrad

In The Political Power of Bad Ideas , Mark Schrad uses one of the greatest oddities of modern history--the broad diffusion throughout the Western world of alcohol-control legislation in the early twentieth century--to make a powerful argument about how bad policy ideas achieve international success. His could an idea that was widely recognized by experts as bad before adoption, and which ultimately failed everywhere, come to be adopted throughout the world? To answer the question, Schrad utilizes an institutionalist approach and focuses in particular on the United States, Sweden, and Russia/the USSR.

Conventional wisdom, based largely on the U.S. experience, blames evangelical zealots for the success of the temperance movement. Yet as Schrad shows, ten countries, along with numerous colonial possessions, enacted prohibition laws. In virtually every case, the consequences were disastrous, and in every country the law was ultimately repealed. Schrad concentrates on the dynamic interaction of ideas and political institutions, tracing the process through which concepts of dubious merit gain momentum and achieve credibility as they wend their way through institutional structures. He also shows that national policy and institutional environments the policy may have been broadly adopted, but countries dealt with the issue in different ways.

While The Political Power of Bad Ideas focuses on one legendary episode, its argument about how and why bad policies achieve legitimacy applies far more broadly. It also extends beyond the simplistic notion that "ideas matter" to show how they influence institutional contexts and interact with a nation's political actors, institutions, and policy dynamics.

320 pages, Hardcover

First published March 24, 2010

About the author

Mark Lawrence Schrad is an associate professor of political science at Villanova University outside of Philadelphia, where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on Russian politics and history, post-communist democratization, comparative politics, international law, international organizations, and globalization. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an MA from Georgetown University and undergraduate degrees from the University of Northern Iowa, while also having attended Bryn Mawr College, Moscow State University and Moscow International University.

His first book, "The Political Power of Bad Ideas: Networks, Institutions, and the Global Prohibition Wave" was published by Oxford University Press in 2010.

His second book, "Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy and the Secret History of the Russian State" was released by Oxford University Press in 2014, and has been translated into a half dozen world languages.

His new book, "Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition" is available in July of 2021. Hailed as "one of the best nonfiction books of 2021," and recipient of a Kirkus star for exceptional merit, it uncovers the long hidden history of prohibitionism worldwide, resulting in a fundamental reappraisal of the role of temperance and prohibitionism in American history.