Our analysis of language, institutions, and the decline of governing ideas in the United States and Sweden has been guided by three basic propositions. T h e first is that ideas and language matter in political life - that they have consequences and often shape public policies as well as public attitudes and political actions. It is likewise clear that ideas and the rhetoric used to convey those ideas mobilize support or opposition around particular policies, however well or poorly conceived those policies may be. Second, we have taken the marketplace of ideas as a point of departure and proposed a way of understanding how rhetoric is produced, used politically, and exchanged for political support in two very different polities. In all idea markets, the keys to production, valuation, exchange, and consumer satisfaction are the kinds of institutional regulatory processes at work. We outlined four broad regulatory mechanisms that can be found in various configurations in all liberal democracies: electoral and party systems, campaign finance practices, interest group systems, and mass media. T h i r d, we contend that the institutional forms and interactions among these regulatory mechanisms constrain the production, distribution, and valuation of ideas in elections and public policy debates. T h e uses of this framework for comparative analysis were illustrated with case studies of the following:

Our primary interest has been to understand how governing ideas are produced in different political systems and how these systems respond to the decline of ideas and the growing disjunctures among parties, leaders, publics, and the agendas of governments.