The purpose of this paper is to reintroduce certain dimensions of policy analysis into the study of institutional change, and to demonstrate how this helps us to better understand the process of state transformation. We look here at the role of political-administrative elites in decision-making for social welfare policy France since the beginning of the 1980s, employing a method that combines the sociology of actors (looking at social background and professional trajectories) and the analysis of ideas (the cognitive and normative representations held by actors).