This is the story of how leading national and international institutions adopted neoliberal economics, along with expectations about unsustainable levels of economic growth. It is also a story about why ideas matter and how they spread through networks of intellectuals, publics, think tanks, activists, and politicians on their way to institutional uptake. The analysis is illustrated by mapping discourse networks and the organizations promoting ideas based on large media samples over time. These semantic networks help identify different economic and environmental discourses, showing which ideas are dominant, which institutions engage with them, and where to look for the next new ideas.

W. Lance Bennett is Professor of Political Science and Ruddick C. Lawrence Professor of Communication at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA, where he directs the Center for Communication and Civic Engagement (www.engagedcitizen.org). The focus of his work is on how communication processes affect citizen engagement with politics. His most recent book is The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics (with Alexandra Segerberg, Cambridge, 2013). He has received the Ithiel de Sola Pool and Murray Edelman career recognition awards from the American Political Science Association. He has also received the Distinguished Scholar Award from the U.S. National Communication Association, and the ICA Fellow Award from the International Communication Association, both for lifetime achievement in the study of human communication.