From the ‘old institutionalism' to the new institutionalism'

No account of the new institutionalisms would be complete without first mentioning the ‘old’ institutionalism. The original institutionalism studied the formal institutions of government and defined the state in terms of its political, administrative, and legal arrangements - as epitomized in the work of Woodrow Wilson.

By the 1950s and 1960s, systemic approaches to political science had largely superseded the old institutionalism, whether structural-functionalist or other ‘holistic’ approaches, such as Marxian analysis, which had its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s. In structural-functionalism, the concept of the state was replaced by the political system and explained in terms of the equilibrium-seeking functioning of its structural parts - through interest articulation and aggregation (Almond and Powell 1966; Easton 1957). This had an essentially conservative bias in favour of the status quo. Embedded in the approach was the uncritical normative assumption that the system would go on so long as its structures functioned in such a way as to achieve its goal - self-maintenance - and that ‘societies which fulfil the functions more completely are pro tanto better’ (Taylor 1967: 156).

By the 1960s and 1970s, behaviourism, also begun in the 1950s, had for the most part submerged the old institutionalism as well as political systems approaches as the predominant approach in political science with a focus on individuals and their behaviour (Somit and Tanenhaus 1982). The state as a term disappeared altogether, as did the political system. ‘Methodological individualism’ replaced the ‘methodological holism’ of structural-functionalist and Marxian approaches, while the old institutionalism was dismissed as mere description. The behavioural ‘revolution’ sought to explain the ‘phenomena of government in terms of the observed and observable behavior of men’ (Truman 1951, cited in Dahl 1961b) and rejected the normative biases of both structural-functional and Marxian approaches in favour of ‘objective’ empirical observation - since the political scientist was concerned with ‘what is, as he says, not what ought to be’ (Dahl 1969). In addition, most behaviourists assumed that ‘human and social behavior can be explained in terms of general laws established by observation’ (Przeworksi and Teune 1970: 4) and sought to develop precise techniques by which to measure data and to demonstrate the validity of law-like theories (Kirkpatrick 1971: 71-3).

‘New institutionalism’ began in the late 1970s and early 1980s with the desire by a wide range of scholars to bring the institutions of the state back into the explanation of political action. It was less focused on rejecting the ‘old institutionalism’, most of the concepts and information of which it treated as background knowledge, than on providing a counter to behaviourism. Behaviourism itself was by now under attack from the inside as well as from the outside because it was perceived as plagued by overquantification and undertheorizing, without much cumu­lation of knowledge into a coherent body of theory (see, e.g., Ostrom 1982; Wahlke 1979).

‘New institutionalism’ was a response to the absence of institutional analysis, of considering collective action qua collective - through composite or institutional actors - rather than reducing political action to its methodological individualist parts. The theoretical core uniting the very disparate kinds of institutionalisms that emerged rejected the propo­sition that observable behaviour was the basic datum of political analysis and argued instead that behaviour cannot be understood without refer­ence to the ‘institutions’ within which such behaviour occurs (Immergut 1998: 6-8).

But while the new institutionalists have been united on the importance of institutions and in the rejection of behaviourism, they have been divided along a number of other dimensions. These include first and fore­most the way in which they define the state - understood now as the whole range of governing structures in and/or through which political actors, governmental as well as non-governmental, interact - and the logic of political action. But new institutionalists have also been divided along continua ranging from universalistic to particularistic generalizations, from positivism to constructivism, and from static to more dynamic explanations of political action.