Constructivist institutionalism, as I will label it, has its origins in attempts to grapple with questions  of  complex  institutional  change—initially…

As Skocpol’s focus on the ‘‘patriotic partnerships’’ developed in wartime suggests (Skocpol 2003; Skocpol, Munson, Karch, and Bayliss 2002), social…

Political scientists, historians, and sociologists of the 1960s–80s grew uncomfort- able with the implication that elites were the motor of…

The 1980s revival of HI among political scientists in the United States was strongly centered on actors in the national…

If institutions are humanly designed constraints on subsequent human action, then those who study them over time will inevitably be…

The search for the causes and agents of institutional change has had many epistemological consequences, not least of which was…

It is true that some classic works that analyze institutions in historical perspective have enjoyed a more or less continuous…

The research program of rational choice institutionalism is founded on abstrac- tion, simpliWcation, analytical rigor, and an insistence on clean…

I think of institutions that are robust over time, and lend themselves to compar- isons across settings, as structured. They…

Within the rational choice tradition there are two now-standard ways to think about institutions.2 The Wrst takes institutions as exogenous…