The ‘new institutionalism’ is a term that now appears with growing frequency in political science. However, there is considerable confusion about just what the ‘new institutionalism’ is, how it differs from other approaches, and what sort of promise or problems it displays. The object of this essay is to provide some preliminary answers to these questions by reviewing recent work in a burgeoning literature. Some of the ambiguities surrounding the new institutionalism can be dispelled if we recognize that it does not constitute a unified body of thought. Instead, at least three different analytical approaches, each of which calls itself a ‘new institutionalism’, have appeared over the past fifteen years. We label these three schools of thought: historical institutionalism, rational choice institutionalism, and sociological institutionalism.’ All of these approaches developed in reaction to the behavioural perspectives that were influential during the 1960s and 1970s and all seek to elucidate the role that institutions play in the determination of social and political outcomes. However, they paint quite different pictures of the political world. In the sections that follow, we provide a brief account of the genesis of each school and characterize what is distinctive about its approach to social and political problems. We then compare their analytical strengths and weaknesses, * An earlier version of this paper WLS presented at the 1994 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association and at a Conference on ‘What is Institutionalism Now? at the

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Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms

1.. HARD CASES 5. Legal Rights A. Legislation . . . We might therefore do well to consider how a philosophical judge might develop, in appropriate cases, theories of what legislative purpose and legal principles require. We shall find that he would construct these theories in the same manner as a philosophical referee would construct the character of a game. I have invented, for this purpose, a lawyer of superhuman skill, learning, patience and acumen, whom I shall call Hercules. I suppose that Hercules is a judge in some representative American jurisdiction. I assume that he accepts the main uncontroversial constitutive and regulative rules of the law in his jurisdiction. He accepts, that is, that statutes have the general power to create and extinguish legal rights, and that judges have the general duty to follow earlier decisions of their court or higher courts whose rationale, as l

Taking Rights Seriously

Econometric policy evaluation: A critique

Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories

Regime theory starts with the proposition that governing capacity is not easily captured through the electoral process. Governing capacity is created and maintained by bringing together coalition partners with appropriate resources, nongovernmental as well as governmental. If a governing coalition is to be viable, it must be able to mobilize resources commensurate with its main policy agenda. The author uses this reasoning as the foundation/or comparing regimes by the nature and difficulty of the government tasks they undertake and the level and kind of resources required for these tasks. Political leadership, he argues, is a creative exercise of political choice, involving the ability to craft arrangements through which resources can be mobilized, thus enabling a community to accomplish difficult and nonroutine goals.

URBAN REGIMES AND THE CAPACITY TO GOVERN: A Political Economy Approach

MAX WEBER'S CONCEPr of legitimacy occupies a paradoxical position in modern political science. On the one hand, it has proved to be the dominant model for empirical investigations of legitimacy. On the other hand, it has met with almost universal criticism by those political philosophers who have evaluated it.' The most common complaint is that in his effort to construct a useful concept for empirical research, Weber distorts the essential meaning of legitimacy. The concept should properly signify a normative evaluation of a political regime: the correctness of its procedures, the justification for its decisions, and the fairness with which it treats its subjects. In Weber's hands, however, legitimacy no longer represents an evaluation of a regime; indeed, it no longer refers directly to the regime itself. Rather, it is defined as the belief of citizens that the regime is, to speak in circles, legitimate. Legitimacy becomes, for Weber, simply a matter of fact, the fact that citizens hold a certain belief. Worse, according to critics, Weber's actual development of the concept does not even preserve this much of the original content. In the end, Weber virtually identifies legitimacy with stable and effective political power, reducing it to a routine submission to authority.2

The Failure of Weber's Conception of Legitimacy: Its Causes and Implications

Grafstein offers critiques of the conventional arguments, challenging their view that institutions are human creations automatically reformed or replaced as society's beliefs and preferences dictate He argues that institutions are distinct physical entities not subject to human authorization

Institutional Realism: Social and Political Constraints on Rational Actors

According to the standard analysis, which is grounded in causal decision theory, the rational decision to participate in mass elections depends on the probability of affecting the outcome. The resulting prediction of abstention is clearly mistaken. According to the alternative, evidential decision theory, voters calculate the conditional expected utility of participating rather than its causal consequences. A version of this theory is introduced into a game theoretic model of electoral participation. Under plausible conditions, the model yields positive turnout at equilibrium even as the size of the electorate increases without bound. The paper also considers the model's utility in explaining group influences on political behavior and the supply of collective goods.

An Evidential Decision Theory of Turnout

Political institutions are both human products and constraints on those participating within them. Focusing on rational choice theory and Marxist political theory, this paper shows that the problem of reconciling these two characteristics pervades modern political research. The upshot is a fundamental ambiguity in political science's specification of what institutions are. The paper proposes a reconciliation of the two characteristics based on a conception of political institutions as particular aggregates of human individuals. The paper explores the political implications of this conception for the possibility of a society changing or eliminating institutional constraints.

The Problem of Institutional Constraint

This paper examines the impact of employment status on voting by formally modeling the effect of partisan government on workers' economic interests. These interests are determined by model workers' labor supply decisions, which are conditioned on their expected wage, unemployment benefits, and the probability of receiving a job offer or being laid off. Both probabilities are influenced by the party in power. The solution to the model implies that, relative to the employed, the higher the education level, the income, and the unemployment benefits of the unemployed the less likely they are to vote for the party associated with higher growth. The unemployment rate has the same impact. These hypotheses are successfully tested on NES 1972–2000 U.S. presidential elections data.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1111/j.1468-2508.2005.00340.x

Robert Grafstein

Papers

The Failure of Weber's Conception of Legitimacy: Its Causes and Implications

Institutional Realism: Social and Political Constraints on Rational Actors

An Evidential Decision Theory of Turnout

The Problem of Institutional Constraint

The Impact of Employment Status on Voting Behavior