If institutions are humanly designed constraints on subsequent human action, then those who study them over time will inevitably be drawn to ask: whose design? And when institutions change, or collapse, what are the exogenous social forces or internal group dynamics that are responsible? These questions about agency- in-change receive a lot of attention in HI—more attention, it is probably fair to claim, than in RC or conventional pluralist social science. The notion of path dependence that is central to HI is compatible with diverse scholarly orientations toward agency in path establishment, as well as in pressures for institutional change. Thus the identiWcation of agents provides one way to organize a brief discussion of the contributions of HI.
The choice of where one goes to look for prime movers in the genesis and development of institutions may again be conditioned by scholarly temperament, as well as philosophical and methodological inclinations. Some analysts have started at the top, attributing agency in the establishment and development of institutions to presidents, judges, high-level bureaucrats, and the intellectuals and business aristocracy who advise and inform them. Others have gone to the bottom, seeing the broader public, particularly social movements and groups motivated by ideas, values, and grievances, as the instigators of institutional construction, change, and destruction.
Inevitably, other scholars have come forward to argue that neither a focus on the top, nor on the bottom can, by itself, tell the whole story of institutional estab- lishment, development, and change; and so one must adopt an interactive approach that analyzes the ideas, interests, and behavior of actors in both state and society. Comparativists, in particular, prefer a multifocal (multivariate) search for the actors and conditions that produce diVerences in national outcomes, but even HI scholars who work on single country settings seem increasingly drawn to interactive approaches.
The choice of focus has methodological implications, because at the top there are few actors and one is likely to proceed by analyzing documents, decisions, speeches, memoirs, and press reports of actions/events. In the study of social movements, voters, and the legislators who are usually the ‘‘Wrst responders’’ to their demands, the ‘‘n’’ is larger, and quantitative analysis more plausible. But a high word- to-number ratio usually characterizes HI work in all categories, and distinguishes it from both RC institutionalism and conventional, cross-sectional, quantitative, hypothesis-testing political science. Compare, for example, the work of Eric Schickler (2001) and Sarah Binder (1997)—both historical institutional works that analyze changes over time in congressional rules—to the conventional Ameri- can Political Science Review quantitative and RC studies of congressional politics.
All this diversity—of agency, methodology, and single-country vs. comparative analysis—might be seen as a weakness in HI. It is, undeniably, a messily eclectic genre, and the lack of agreement on foci and approaches does distinguish HI from RC and conventional, cross-sectional political science. The ‘‘undisciplined’’ nature of HI in its late adolescence was no doubt what prompted the two founders of APD’s Xagship journal (Studies in American Political Development) to write their 2004 book, The Search for American Political Development (Orren and Skowronek). However, worries about lack of common deWnitions, methods, and parameters have not produced, as yet, much sentiment to impose order via more restrictive criteria for scholars in the American HI fold.
