Varieties of capitalism : the institutional foundations ofcomparative advantage

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.2307%2F3343168.pdf

Development as Freedom

This article provides an overview of recent developments in historical institutionalism. First, it reviews some distinctions that are commonly drawn between the ihistoricali and the irational choicei variants of institutionalism and shows that there are more points of tangency than typically assumed. However, differences remain in how scholars in the two traditions approach empirical problems. The contrast of rational choiceis emphasis on institutions as coordination mechanisms that generate or sustain equilibria versus historical institutionalismis 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. Drawing on insights from recent historical institutional work on icritical juncturesi and on ipolicy feedbacks,i 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.

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Historical institutionalism in comparative politics

Meanwhile, the authors' antidote to the American sicknessa quest for democratic community that draws on our diverse civic and religious traditionshas contributed to a vigorous scholarly and popular debate. Attention has been focused on forms of social organization, be it civil society, democratic communitarianism, or associative democracy, that can humanize the market and the administrative state. In their new Introduction the authors relate the argument of their book both to the current realities of American society and to the growing debate about the country's future. With this new edition one of the most influential books of recent times takes on a new immediacy.\

Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life

The newest “new institutionalism,” discursive institutionalism, lends insight into the role of ideas and discourse in politics while providing a more dynamic approach to institutional change than the older three new institutionalisms. Ideas are the substantive content of discourse. They exist at three levels—policies, programs, and philosophies—and can be categorized into two types, cognitive and normative. Discourse is the interactive process of conveying ideas. It comes in two forms: the coordinative discourse among policy actors and the communicative discourse between political actors and the public. These forms differ in two formal institutional contexts; simple polities have a stronger communicative discourse and compound polities a stronger coordinative discourse. The institutions of discursive institutionalism, moreover, are not external-rule-following structures but rather are simultaneously structures and constructs internal to agents whose “background ideational abilities” within a given “meanin...

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Discursive Institutionalism: The Explanatory Power of Ideas and Discourse

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

O neo-institucionalismo nao constitui uma corrente de pensamento unificada. Ao contrario, pelo menos tres metodos de analise diferentes apareceram nessa area no ultimo quarto de seculo: o institucionalismo historico, o institucionalismo da escolha racional e o institucionalismo sociologico. Todas elas tratam, por ângulos diferentes, do papel desempenhado pelas instituicoes na determinacao de resultados sociais e politicos. Expoe-se e examina-se a genese de cada uma dessas variantes do "neo-institucionalismo", assim como o que distingue suas maneiras de tratar dos problemas sociais e politicos.

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As três versões do neo-institucionalismo

On peut mieux apprehender le « neo-institutionnalisme » en science politique comme le developpement de trois ecoles de pensee distinctes : institutionnalisme historique, institutionnalisme des choix rationnels, et institutionnalisme sociologique. Les auteurs resument les intuitions centrales de chaque ecole, en portant une attention particuliere a la dualite entre les approches « culturelle » et « calculatrice » et evaluent les avantages et les faiblesses de chaque ecole de pensee en soulevant deux questions cles : comment les institutions influencent le comportement et ou se situent l'origine et le changement de ces institutions. En conclusion, ils explorent, pour chaque ecole, les possibilites d'integrer certaines de ces intuitions les unes aux autres, de facon a favoriser un dialogue plus fecond entre elles.

La science politique et les trois néo-institutionnalismes

Hay and Wincott raise an interesting question: can historical institutionalism develop a distinctive social ontology with insights into the structure-agency problem that transcend those found in rational choice or sociological variants of the `new institutionalism'? We take up this question but address ®rst several issues they pose along the way. To begin with, the issue of whether historical institutionalism has the potential to develop a novel approach to the structure-agency problem should be distinguished from the issue of whether historical institutionalism can already be said to have accomplished this task. On this point, we stand by the observation in our original essay that most work in historical institutionalism uses both the `calculus' and `cultural' approaches, creating something of an amalgam but not one that represents a fully-realized alternative to either of these approaches. Indeed, compared to these other schools of thought, historical institutionalists have devoted more attention to explaining macro-political outcomes than to developing the micro-logic that links institutional structures to action; and, on our reading, Hay and Wincott do not really challenge this contention. They do, however, criticize rational choice and sociological institutionalism for being overly structuralist, a ̄aw they expect historical institutionalism to overcome. In our view, this underestimates these schools of thought. Both contain many lines of analysis that grant actors a substantial role in the production and reproduction of institutional structures. Rational choice institutionalism, for instance, acknowledges a `folk theorem' which speci®es that, in a repeated game with more than two players, there is likely to be more than one equilibrium on which the actors can converge ± which means that the outcome often cannot be read directly from the structure of the game. Moreover,

Rosemary C. R. Taylor

Papers

Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms

As três versões do neo-institucionalismo

La science politique et les trois néo-institutionnalismes

The Potential of Historical Institutionalism: a Response to Hay and Wincott

The politics of prevention.