One development has been an enhanced appreciation of the need for explanations that rest on firm micro foundations. The analyses offered thus incorporate elements of deduction and induction in ways that overcome traditional distinctions between historical institutionalism's characteristic focus on specific contextual conditions and rational choice's characteristic search for generalizable features of political behavior rooted in the incentive structures that individuals face.Ī second illustration of border crossing is the equally important impact of rational choice on the work of many historical institutionalists. This strategy, which they call analytic narratives, represents an attempt to construct explanations of empirical events through analyses that “respect the specifics of time and place but within a framework that both disciplines the detail and appropriates it for purposes that transcend the particular story” ( Levi 1999). A few examples will suffice to illustrate this point.įirst, a group of prominent theorists working out of a rational choice perspective have become proponents of a more eclectic approach that combines elements of deductive theory-the hallmark of rational choice-with an explicit attempt to contextualize the analysis in ways that historical institutionalists have long advocated ( Bates et al 1998b). The walls dividing the three perspectives have also been eroded by “border crossers” who have resisted the tendencies toward cordoning these schools off from each other and who borrow liberally (and often fruitfully) where they can, in order to answer specific empirical questions. The differences that have been identified amount to tendencies that apply unevenly across particular authors within each school of thought ( Hall & Taylor 1996). 1Each of these three schools in fact represents a sprawling literature characterized by tremendous internal diversity, and it is often also difficult to draw hard and fast lines between them. It is now conventional to distinguish three different varieties of institutionalism: rational choice institutionalism, historical institutionalism, and sociological institutionalism. At the same time, recent work has given rise to new debates.
Institutional analysis has a distinguished pedigree in comparative politics, and the “new” institutionalist literature of the past two decades has both sustained this venerable tradition and deepened our understanding of the role of institutions in political life. Drawing on insights from recent historical institutional work on “critical junctures” and on “policy feedbacks,” the article proposes a way of thinking about institutional evolution and path dependency that provides an alternative to equilibrium and other approaches that separate the analysis of institutional stability from that of institutional change.
The contrast of rational choice's emphasis on institutions as coordination mechanisms that generate or sustain equilibria versus historical institutionalism's emphasis on how institutions emerge from and are embedded in concrete temporal processes serves as the foundation for the second half of the essay, which assesses our progress in understanding institutional formation and change. However, differences remain in how scholars in the two traditions approach empirical problems.
First, it reviews some distinctions that are commonly drawn between the “historical” and the “rational choice” variants of institutionalism and shows that there are more points of tangency than typically assumed. ▪ AbstractThis article provides an overview of recent developments in historical institutionalism.
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