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Comparative Political Studies
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DOI: 10.1177/001041400003300604
2000 33: 762Comparative Political Studies
Fritz W. Scharpf
Institutions in Comparative Policy Research
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Article by an MPIfG researcher
Fritz W. Scharpf: Institutions in Comparative Policy Research. In: Comparative Political Studies 33(6-7), 762-790 (2000).
Sage Publications
The original publication is available at the publisher’s web site: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/001041400003300604
COMPARATIVE POLITICAL STUDIES / August-September 2000Scharpf / INSTITUTIONS IN COMPARATIVE POLICY RESEARCH
The article explores the intersections between the different perspectives of institutional and pol
-
icy research and discusses the characteristic purposes and conditions of theory-oriented policy
research, where the usefulness of statistical analyses is generally constrained by the complexity
and contingency of causal influences. Although comparative case studies are better able to deal
with these conditions, their capacity to empirically identify the causal effect of differing institu
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tional conditions on policy outcomes depends on a restrictive case selection that would need to
hold constant the influence of two other sets of contingent factors—the policy challenges actu
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ally faced and the preferences and perceptions of the actors involved. When this is not possible,
empirical policy research may usefully resort to a set of institutionalist working hypotheses that
are derived from the narrowly specified theoretical assumptions of rational-choice
institutionalism. Although these hypotheses will often be wrong, they are useful in guiding the
empirical search for factors that are able to explain policy outcomes that deviate from predictions
of the rationalist model.
INSTITUTIONS IN COMPARATIVE
POLICY RESEARCH
FRITZ W. SCHARPF
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies
V
arieties of the new institutionalism hold a promise of theoretical inte-
gration across several subdisciplines of the social sciences and a wide
range of research fields, including comparative politics, the study of Euro
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pean integration, comparative political economy, comparative industrial
relations, and comparative industrial governance (Hall & Taylor, 1996;
Jupille & Caporaso, 1999; Thelen, 1999). There are thus good reasons to
explore the usefulness of institutional explanations in comparative policy
research as well. However, in doing so, we need to be aware of the special
conditions that complicate their application in this particular field. To begin
with, it seems useful to specify the ways in which institutionalist and policy
perspectives may intersect.
The policy perspective focuses on two different questions that I described
as being problem oriented and interaction oriented (Scharpf, 1997, pp. 10-
12). Under the first perspective, policy research will analyze the nature and
causes of (societal) problems that (public) policy is expected to resolve and the
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© 2000 Sage Publications, Inc.
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(empirical or potential) effectiveness of policy responses to these problems.
Quite obviously, much of the substantive knowledge required in problem-
oriented policy analyses will not come from political science but from other
disciplines such as macroeconomics, labor-market economics, public health,
biology, or climatology. By contrast, within the perspective of interaction-
oriented policy research, political-science knowledge is likely to dominate
analyses of the interactions between policy makers and of the conditions that
favor or impede their ability to adopt and implement those policy responses
that problem-oriented analyses have identified as being potentially effective.
Similarly, the study of institutions also includes two distinct perspectives,
with one focusing on the consequences that institutions may have for actors
and actions within their domains and the other focusing on the genesis of and
transformation of institutional arrangements themselves. If we combine
these perspectives in a fourfold table, it is clear that interesting research ques
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tions may be located in all four cells (see Figure 1).
In the first cell, one would locate functionalist attempts to explain the exis
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tence of specific institutions by their ability to solve certain societal or eco
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nomic problems—a perspective that, for instance, informs the institution-
alism of transaction-cost economics (Williamson, 1985). In the second cell,
the perspective is reversed, asking how the existence of given institutions
contributes to the emergence or avoidance of certain societal or economic
problems—a perspective adopted by structuralist studies that, for instance,
attribute differences in the rate of inflation to the existence or absence of cen
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tralized wage-setting institutions (Calmfors & Driffil, 1988) or of independ
-
ent central banks (Cukierman, 1992). In the third cell, research could focus
on how institutional change may be explained as the outcome of strategic
interactions between purposeful and resourceful actors—a perspective that,
Scharpf / INSTITUTIONS IN COMPARATIVE POLICY RESEARCH 763
Figure 1. Institutional perspective versus policy perspective.
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for instance, has been highly productive in explaining major institutional
changes in the European Union (EU) as the outcome of strategic interactions
between national governments (Moravcsik, 1998).
The fourth cell, finally, identifies the perspective on institutions that is
characteristic of interaction-oriented policy research. It treats institutions as
one set of factors affecting the interactions between policy actors and hence
the greater or lesser capacity of policy-making systems to adopt and imple
-
ment effective responses to policy problems. This is the perspective adopted
in this article. It differs from the structuralism in the second cell by its actor-
centered character. Actors and their interacting choices, rather than institu
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tions, are assumed to be the proximate causes of policy responses, whereas
institutional conditions, to the extent that they are able to influence actor
choices, are conceptualized as remote causes (Scharpf, 1997). However,
because actors differ in their orientations and capabilities and because we
also need to take account of the problem perspective, the search for or the use
of institutional explanations faces characteristic difficulties in the context of
interaction-oriented policy research. These difficulties will be discussed in
the following section; I will then turn to the uses of institutional explanations
in comparative policy studies.
1
THE ELUSIVE QUEST FOR GENERALITY
To a greater degree than is otherwise true in the social sciences, policy
research aspires to pragmatic usefulness in the sense that it should be able to
provide information that (if heeded by policy makers—which is another
question altogether) could contribute to the design of effective and feasible
policy responses to given societal problems. At the practical end of a contin
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uum, this calls for in-depth analyses of specific policy problems and interac
-
tion constellations that may best be done by consultants or the in-house staffs
of ministerial departments and other policy-making organizations rather than
by theory-oriented academic research. At the same time, however, such
applied work would greatly benefit from being able to draw on empirically
validated theoretical propositions specifying general causal mechanisms
affecting the feasibility and effectiveness of policy options.
Given the multidimensionality and variety of real-world policy problems,
however, any general theoretical proposition can at best only cover partial
764 COMPARATIVE POLITICAL STUDIES / August-September 2000
1. Most of my examples will be taken from the fields that I know best—cross-national com
-
parative studies of welfare state and employment policy responses to changes in the international
economic environment (Scharpf, 1991; Scharpf & Schmidt, in press).
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aspects that need to be integrated with other partial theories in the develop
-
ment of effective policy designs—just as the solution of any complex engi
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neering problem will draw on a wide range of distinct natural-science theo
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ries. However, in policy research, even the search for partial theories is
affected by the real complexity of its subject matter. Whereas the natural sci
-
ences can often rely on experimental designs to isolate the causal effect of a
single factor, this is not usually possible in the social sciences. Here the com
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parative empirical study of real-world phenomena is generally our only way
to discover causal relationships. However, regardless of whether the compar
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ison is intertemporal, cross-sectional, or cross-national (which will be my
focus here), if institutional conditions are thought to matter, then they are in
themselves very complex factors with a high degree of variability across time
and space. Moreover, if the dependent variable is to be policy responses,
interaction-oriented policy research must also consider at least two addi
-
tional sets of factors that are likely to have causal influence—the characteris
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tics of the policy problems faced and the characteristics of the policy actors
involved. These conditions constrain the design of theory-oriented and
empirical policy research (Scharpf, 1997, chapter 3).
The standard way of dealing with complex factor constellations in empiri-
cal research is through multivariate statistical analyses that seek to identify
the causal effect of specific variables while trying to control for the influence
of other factors. Because internationally comparative policy studies are inev-
itably plagued with the small-n problem of too many variables and too few
cases, it has become common practice to multiply the number of available
observations by relying on cross-country, pooled time-series data (Beck &
Katz, 1995). Their usefulness is limited, however, by the fact that some of the
factors that influence outcomes may be both country-specific and relatively
stable over time so that the multiplication of observations does not increase
the available information to nearly the same degree. The same is true if exog
-
enous shocks (like the oil price crises of 1973 to 1975 and of 1979 to 1981)
affect all countries at the same time. If these fixed effects are then accounted
for by the introduction of country and year dummies in the regression equa
-
tions, then what is left is statistical information about relationships between
variables that are cleaned of all influences that are specific for a given country
or a given time period.
In the field of comparative political economy, there is a growing and meth
-
odologically sophisticated literature relying on these remedies for the
small-n disease. They seem most useful for the identification of stable ceteris
paribus relationships of an essentially structural character. Examples are
studies of the relative influence on taxation and social spending levels of eco
-
nomic growth, trade openness, capital mobility, and other economic factors
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