Institutionalism political science. institutionalism 2022-10-09
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Institutionalism is a broad and multifaceted approach to understanding political and social phenomena that emphasizes the role of institutions in shaping human behavior and outcomes. It is a major theoretical perspective within political science that has gained widespread popularity in recent decades due to its ability to explain complex and diverse political and social processes in a systematic and coherent way.
Institutionalism suggests that institutions, or the formal and informal rules, norms, and practices that shape social and political interactions, play a central role in shaping behavior and outcomes. This perspective holds that institutions provide a framework for action and interaction, and that they are shaped by the preferences, beliefs, and interests of those who create and maintain them.
There are several different strands of institutionalism within political science, each with its own unique focus and set of assumptions. One of the most influential strands is rational choice institutionalism, which is based on the assumption that individuals act in their own self-interest and are guided by rational calculation. This perspective suggests that individuals will choose the course of action that is most likely to maximize their own benefits and minimize their costs, and that institutions are shaped by these rational calculations.
Another influential strand of institutionalism is sociological institutionalism, which emphasizes the cultural and social context in which institutions are embedded. This perspective suggests that institutions are shaped by the values, beliefs, and norms of the societies in which they exist, and that they reflect and reproduce these cultural and social norms.
Institutionalism has been applied to a wide range of political and social phenomena, including elections, policy-making, social movements, and international relations. It has also been used to understand the role of institutions in shaping economic outcomes, including economic growth, development, and inequality.
One of the key contributions of institutionalism is its ability to explain how institutions shape and are shaped by the actions and interactions of individuals within them. This perspective suggests that institutions provide a framework for action and interaction, and that they are shaped by the preferences, beliefs, and interests of those who create and maintain them. It also highlights the importance of understanding the cultural and social context in which institutions exist, and the ways in which they reflect and reproduce cultural and social norms.
Overall, institutionalism is a valuable approach to understanding political and social phenomena that emphasizes the role of institutions in shaping human behavior and outcomes. It offers a systematic and coherent way to understand complex and diverse processes and has been applied to a wide range of political and social phenomena.
Historical institutionalism
We know, for example, that even in well-developed and long-standing institutions different people will read cultural signals differently and will define 'appropriate' in very different ways. Both of those implications can be easily substantiated. In particular, if the initial choices made by the formulators of a policy or institution are inadequate, institutions must find some means of adaptation or will cease to exist see Genschel, 1997. In essence, government was about the formation and application of law through public institutions, with politics as it is usually conceptualized as a very minor part of the exercise. This would add a more direct performance element to the discussion of institutions, something akin to the project of the 'empirical institutionalists.
Ostrom argues that the leadership of an institution has a pronounced interest in having their rules followed. The President of Hungary is also elected by the National Assembly, but serves as the head of state, performing the ceremonial functions and also serving as Commander-in-chief of the armed forces. This is in marked contrast to the more fundamental changes associated with other forms of rational choice institutionalism. For example, William Niskanen 1971, 1994 has argued that the leaders of bureaucratic organizations in government use their positions to maximize personal utility, usually through instruments such as larger budgets and larger allocations of personnel. Also, in this tradition the State is linked organically with society and society is significantly influenced by the nature of the State. As they state 1989, p. In terms of Etzioni's scheme of organizational analysis this would be a 'calculative' involvement of the individual with the organization.
If the institutionalist perspective is to provide a useful alternative to more individualistic and purposive explanations of political life, then it must be able to say how the institutions that are so central to the theory come into being in the first instance. Law was crucial for molding what was in essence a new State into an effective body, something which could never have been done by political science as it has come to be practiced. The impetus for this shift in sociological theory appears to be a reaction to the rapid spread of arguments about the individuation of societies Cerny, 1990; Zum, 1993 , and the analogous strengthening of methodological individualism in other social science disciplines, especially economics 22 INSTITUTIONAL THEORY IN POLITICAL SCIENCE Scott, 1995b. It would no longer be sufficient to describe politics in a number of countries and make interesting interpretations of those systems; the interpretations had to be fitted into a more general frame of theory. THE BEHAVIORAL AND THE RATIONAL REVOLUTIONS It is quite common to talk of the behavioral revolution which occurred during the 1950s and 1960s as fundamentally transforming the discipline of political science, and to a lesser extent other social sciences like sociology. The Good Institution The rational choice perspective on institutions purports to be a formal, analytical statement about institutions, but that scientific pretense obscures a strong normative element at the heart of most versions of this approach.
Institutional theory in political science: the new institutionalism
Dowding's critique is somewhat too simple an interpretation of the argument being made by March and Olsen, but even a sympathetic critic must wonder about the autonomy of individuals as well as the autonomy of institutions in this analysis. As noted above see pp. Also, March and Olsen argue that decision-making is prospective and we cannot know what will be in our interest in the future - we do indeed operate under Rawls's 'veil of ignorance' 1970. For example, while individuals may bring with them a variety of values when they join most institutions, the answer does not appear very satisfying for institutions that have rules and values that are quite different from those found in the surrounding society, but which yet perform important services for that society. Determine whether Sneetchland will have a unicameral or bicameral legislature, whether representatives are chosen by direct elections, indirect elections, or appointment by some other political institution, and how many representatives their should be determine the number in both chambers if bicameral. In particular, more than the other views of institutionalism this approach tends to provide a lucid analytic connection between individuals and their institutions through the capacity of institutions to shape the preferences of individuals and to manipulate the incentives available to members of the organization. These allocations are assumed to generate for the 'bureau chief' personal benefits such as a higher salary, a thicker carpet, and greater personal prestige.
The recruitment patterns of these organizations, and the values that the recruits bring with them from their academic training, solidify the patterns of thinking and acting within each organization. For instance, if a unitary state is a system of government for a country with large minority populations spread over a sizable geographic area, centralized political control could weaken the legitimation of that political authority, and could in turn make it harder for the government to deliver goods and services, maintain stability, or effectively govern. For most of European political science the State never really left. For example, some of the major opposition to trucking and airline deregulation in the United States came from the affected industries themselves Derthick and Quirk, 1985. Kenneth Arrow's struggles with this problem helped win him the Nobel Prize, but did not solve the fundamental problems when one begins from an individualistic position.
It is easy to criticize their work from the advantage of the social sciences as they have developed over the past 50 years, but that criticism is unfair to the purposes and the contributions of the older institutionalist scholars. The American president, for example, must be both a unifier of the nation and carry the chief executive functions of government. Among other things Buchanan and Tullock provided in their discussion of constitutional rules was a rational justification of the common practice of majority voting. His analysis of the impacts of institutions did contain all the basic components of the historical institutionalist approach. In particular, holism tended to direct analysis away from comparison in the manner in which it is now often practiced.
Similarly, students of political parties, e. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. As with much of the other game-theoretic discussion of institutions, this design task must be conceptualized in the context of an extended series of games in which the players have the opportunity to punish any defectors on one iteration of the game. One advantage may be that this approach can more precisely predict political outcomes, since it very often confines the analytic focus to a single institution at a single moment in time. Further, the formalism tended to make political science more ethnocentric than it had to be Macridis, 1955. With this argument, however, a potential disadvantage becomes clear: rational choice institutionalism may miss external factors outside the institution in focus that are influencing a given outcome. This is in part because political science has been more eclectic than most disciplines in borrowing the approaches of others while, as argued above, institutionalism represents a return to the original foundations of the.
As might be expected, there have been a variety of different versions of just what that relationship should be, and those differences are to SOlne degree a function of different national perspectives on both law and governing. Later, when discussing government in the middle ages, he provides pp. For the rest of this chapter, we will take a broad look at a number of institutional systems of government, beginning with the distinction between unitary states and federated state and then overview the legislative, executive, and judicial foundations of modern government. Montesquieu 1989 identified the need for balance in political structures and served as a foundation for the American separation of powers doctrine for the weakening of potentially autocratic governments Fontana, 1994; Rohr, 1995. First, some components of the new institutionalism are more compatible with the assumptions of the dominant individualistic approaches to the discipline than are others. In this sense, the American president is both the leader of the nation and the leader of executive government. Further, once created there needs to be a clear logic for change.
