Whilst there may well be something of a tension between the contemporary trajec- tory of historical institutionalism and the developing constructivist institutionalist research agenda, this should not hide the considerable indebtedness of the latter to earlier versions of the former. The work of Peter A. Hall, in particular that on policy paradigms, social learning, and institutional change (1993), has proved a crucial source of inspiration for many contemporary currents in constructivist institution- alism. Indeed, the latter’s indebtedness to historical institutionalism is arguably rather greater than its indebtedness to constructivism in international relations theory. For despite the ostensible similarities between constructivist institutionalism and constructivism in international relations theory, the former has been driven to a far greater extent than the latter by the attempt to resolve particular empirical puzzles. Those puzzles, principally concerned with understanding the conditions of existence of signiWcant path-shaping institutional change, have led institutional- ists to consider the role of ideas in inXuencing the developmental trajectory of institutions under conditions of uncertainly and/or crisis. They were explored Wrst by historical institutionalists, most notably Peter A. Hall.
Hall’s work represents by far the most sustained, consistent, and systematic attempt within the historical institutionalist perspective to accord a key role for ideas in the determination of institutional outcomes. Like most of the con- structivist institutionalist scholarship which it would come to inform, Hall’s approach to ideas comes not from a prior ontological commitment (as in constructivist international relations theory), but from the observation of an empirical regularity—ideational change invariably precedes institutional change. Drawing inspiration from Kuhn, Hall argues that policy is made within the context of ‘‘policy paradigms.’’ Such interpretative schema are internalized by politicians, state managers, policy experts, and the like. They come to deWne a range of legitimate policy techniques, mechanisms, and instruments, thereby delimiting the very targets and goals of policy itself. In short, they come to circumscribe the realm of the politically feasible, practical, and desirable. As Hall elaborates:
policy makers customarily work within a framework of ideas and standards that speciWes not only the goals of policy and the kind of instruments that can be used to attain them, but also the very nature of the problems they are meant to be addressing. . . . [T]his framework is embedded in the very terminology through which policy makers communicate about their work, and it is inXuential precisely because so much of it is taken for granted and unamenable to scrutiny as a whole. (1993, 279)
The identiWcation of such distinctive policy paradigms allows Hall to diVerentiate between: (a) periods of ‘‘normal’’ policy-making (and change) in which the paradigm remains largely unchallenged (at least within the conWnes of the policy-making arena) and in which change is largely incremental; and (b) periods of ‘‘exceptional’’ policy-making (and change), often associated with crises, in which the very parameters that previously circumscribed policy options are cast asunder and replaced, and in which the realm of the politically possible, feasible, and desirable is correspondingly reconWgured.
Hall concentrates on developing an abstracted, largely deductive, and theoretically-informed periodization of the policy process which might be applied in a variety of contexts. It stresses the signiWcance of ideas (in the form of policy-making paradigms which are seen to act as cognitive Wlters) and leads to a periodization of institutional change in terms of the policy-making paradigms such institutions instantiate and reXect. Yet it remains largely descriptive, having little to say about the processes of change which underlie the model.
This provides the point of departure for a signiWcant body of more recent, and more self-consciously constructivist, scholarship (see, especially, Blyth 2002; Hay 2001). This still nascent literature asks under what conditions paradigms emerge, consoli- date, accumulate anomalies, and become subject to challenge and replacement. Attention has focused in particular upon the moment of crisis itself, a concept much invoked but rarely conceptualized or further explicated in the existing literature.10
Blyth’s meticulous work on the US and Swedish cases (2002) shows well the additional analytical purchase that constructivism oVers to institutionalists interested not only in institutional process tracing but in accounting for the emergence of new policy paradigms and attendant institutional logics in and through moments of crisis.11 Indeed, his landmark study demonstrates the causal and constitutive role of ideas in shaping the developmental trajectories of advanced capitalist economies. It has rapidly become a, perhaps the, key referent and point of departure for the constructivist institutionalist research programme.
The analytical focus of his attentions is the moment of crisis itself, in which one policy paradigm is replaced by another. Crises, he suggests, can be viewed as moments in which actors’ perceptions of their own self-interest become problematized. Consequently, the resolution of a crisis entails the restoration of a more ‘‘normal’’ condition in which actors’ interests are once again made clear and transparent to them. As nature abhors a vacuum, so, it seems, political systems abhor uncertainty. Crises thus unleash short bouts of intense ideational contestation in which agents struggle to provide compelling and convincing diagnoses of the pathologies aZicting the old regime/policy paradigm and the reforms appropriate to the resolution of the crisis. Moreover, and crucially for his analysis, such crisis theories, arising as they do in moments of uncertainty, play a genuinely constructive
role in establishing a new trajectory of institutional evolution. They are, in other words, not reducible to the condition they seek to describe and explain.
The implications of this are clear—if we are to understand path-shaping institu- tional change we must acknowledge the independent causal and constitutive role of ideas, since the developmental trajectory of a given regime or policy paradigm cannot be derived from the exhibited or latent contradictions of the old regime or policy paradigm. It is, instead, contingent upon the ideational contestation unleashed in the moment of crisis itself. Though this is not an inference that Blyth himself draws, there is, then, no hope of a predictive science of crisis resolution, capable of pointing prior to the onset of crisis to the path of institutional change—for the causal chain is incomplete until such time as the crisis has been successfully narrated. This is an important intervention and it provides a series of correspondingly signiWcant insights into the developmental trajectories of Swedish and US capital- ism in the twentieth century. In particular, it draws attention to the role of business in proselytizing and sponsoring new and/or alternative economic theories and in setting the discursive parameters within which inXuential crisis narratives are likely to be framed, and to the crucial relationship between business, think tanks, and professional economists. It also reminds us, usefully, that in order to prove inXuential, (economic) ideas need not bear much relationship to the reality they purportedly represent. In a classically constructivist institutionalist vein, it demonstrates that, if believed and acted upon, economic ideas have a tendency to
become self-fulWlling prophecies (see also Hay and Rosamond 2002).
Yet its limitations also show that constructivist institutionalism is still very much a work in progress. Blyth raises just as many theoretical, methodological, and, indeed, empirical questions as he answers. Moreover, the text is characterized by some signiWcant and by no means unrepresentative tensions, contradictions, and silences. None of these are insurmountable impediments to the development of a more consistently constructivist institutionalism. Yet they do perhaps serve to indicate the work still required if the profound challenge that constructivism poses to more conventional approaches to institutional analysis, and the insights it oVers, are both to be more widely appreciated.
In the context of contemporary neoinstitutionalism, it is Blyth’s comments on the relationship between ideas and interests that are likely to prove most controversial. It is in these comments that the distinctiveness of the constructivist variant of institutionalism resides. His core claim is, in essence, that actors’ conduct is not a (direct) reXection of their material interests but, rather, a reXection of particu- lar perceptions of their material interests (see also Wendt 1999, 113–35). Our material circumstances do not directly determine our behavior, though our perceptions of such circumstances (and, indeed, of our stake in various conceivable outcomes), may.12 In his own terms, it is ideas that render interests ‘‘actionable’’ (Blyth 2002, 39).
However intuitively plausible or obvious this may seem, it is important to note that it sits in some considerable tension to almost all existing neoinstitutionalist scholarship. For, conventionally, it is actors’ material interests rather than their perceptionsofthoseintereststhatare assumedthekeydeterminantsoftheir behavior. Though convenient and parsimonious, this is unrealistic—and this is the construc- tivist’s point. Yet, there is some ambiguity and inconsistency in the manner in which he operationalizes this important insight, which speaks to a potentially wider ambiguity within constructivist institutionalism. For, on occasions, Blyth refers to interests as ‘‘social constructs that are open to redeWnition through ideological contestation’’ (2002, 271; see also Abdelal, Blyth, and Parsons 2006). All trace of a materialist conception of interest is eliminated at a stroke. At other points in the text, however, interests are treated as materially given and as clearly separate from per- ceptions of interests, as for instance when he counterposes the ‘‘ideas held by agents’’ and ‘‘their structurally-derived interests’’ (2002, 33–4). Here, like many other con- structivists, Blyth seems to fall back on an essentially material conception of interests (see also Berman 1998; McNamara 1998; Wendt 1999). Obviously it makes no sense to view the latter as social constructs. To be clear, though these two formulations are mutually exclusive (interests are either social constructs or given by material circum- stances, they cannot be both), neither is incompatible with Blyth’s core claim (that in order to be actionable, interests have to be capable of being articulated). They are merely diVerent ways of operationalizing that core assumption. Yet it does serve to hide a potentially more fundamental lacuna.
This only becomes fully apparent when Blyth’s second core premise is recalled: crises are situations in which actors’ interests (presumably here conceptualized as social constructs rather than material givens) become blurred. In itself this is far from self-evident and, given the centrality of the claim to the overall argument he presents, it is perhaps surprising that Blyth chooses not to defend the claim. It is not clear that moments of crisis do indeed lead to uncertainty about actors’ interests. Indeed, whilst crises might plausibly be seen to provide focal points around which competing political narratives might serve to reorient actors’ sense of their own self-interest, in the Wrst instance are they not more likely to result in the vehement reassertion, expression, and articulation of prior conceptions of self-interest—often in the intensity of political conXict? Is it not somewhat perverse, for instance, to suggest that during the infamous Winter of Discontent of 1978–9 (as clear an instance of crisis as one might imagine), Britain’s striking
public sector workers were unclear about their interests in resisting enforced wage moderation? Or to see the Callaghan Government as unclear about its interests in bringing such industrial militancy to an end?
A second problem relates to the rather uneven ontology that Blyth seems to rely upon here. In situations in which actors’ interests are not problematized, ideas matter less and, presumably, non-constructivist techniques will suYce; yet in con- ditions of crisis, in which interests are rendered problematic, and ideas ‘‘matter more,’’ only constructivism will do (for similar formulations see Berman 1998; Campbell 2001). As I have suggested elsewhere (Hay 2002, 214–15), however tempting it may be to see ideas as somehow more signiWcant in the uncertainty and confusion of the moment of crisis, this is a temptation we should surely resist. It is not that ideas matter more in times of crisis, so much that new ideas do and that we are particularly interested in their impact. Once the crisis is resolved and a new paradigm installed, the ideas actors hold may become internalized and unquestioned once again, but this does not mean that they cease to aVect their behavior.
Yet this is not the key point at issue here. For it is only once we accept as self- evident the claim that moments of crisis problematize pre-existing conceptions of self-interest that the problems really start. If crises are moments of radical inde- terminacy in which actors an incapable of articulating and hence rendering ‘‘actionable’’ their interests (moments of ‘‘Knightian uncertainty’’ in Blyth’s terms), then how is it that such situation are ever resolved? Blyth, it would seem, must rely upon certain actors—notably inXuential opinion formers with access to signiWcant resources for the promotion and dissemination of crisis narratives—to be rather clearer about their own interests. For the resolution of the crisis requires, in Blyth’s terms, that such actors prove themselves capable of providing an idea- tional focus for the reconstitution of the perceived self-interests of the population at large. Whose self-interests does such a new paradigm advance? And in a situation of Knightian uncertainty, how is it that such actors are capable of rendering actionable their own interests? In short, where do such ideas come from and who, in a moment of crisis, is capable of perceiving that they have a clearly identiWed self-interest to the served by the promotion of such ideas? If, as Blyth consistently seems to suggest, it is organized interests with access to sign- iWcant material resources (such as business) that come to seize the opportunity presented by a moment of crisis, then the role of ideas in determining outcomes would seem to have been signiWcantly attenuated. If access to material resources is a condition of successful crisis-narration, if only organized business has access to such resources, and if neoliberalism is held to reXect the (actual or perceived) self-interest of business, then won’t a materialist explanation of the rise of neoliberalism in the USA in the 1970s or Sweden in the 1980s suYce? To prevent this slippage towards a residual materialism, Blyth and other exponents of constructivist institutionalism need to be able to tell us rather more about the determinants (material and ideational), internal dynamics, and narration of the
crisis itself. The overly parsimonious conception of crises as moments of Knightian uncertainty may, in this respect, obscure more than it reveals.
This is perhaps suggestive of a broader, indeed somewhat characteristic, failing of constructivistinstitutionalismtodate—itstendencytofallbackupon, oratleastnotto close oV fully, the return to a rump materialism. Very often, as in this case, alternative and more parsimonious accounts can be oVered of the very same data constructivist institutionalists present that make little or no causal reference to the role of ideas.
A second set of concerns relates to the theoretical status of constructivist institutionalist insights. Again, the issue is a more general one. For, like much work within this development tradition, although constructed as a work of explanatory/causal analysis, it is not always clear that Blyth does adequately explain the outcomes whose origins he details. Indeed, it would seem as though abstracted redescription and explanation are frequently conXated. In other words, an abstract and stylized sequence consistent with the empirical evidence is presented as an explanation of speciWc outcomes in the context being considered. While crises may well be what states make of them, it is not clear that constructivist institu- tionalists have explained why states make of them what they do—indeed, it is precisely in this ambiguity that the possibility of the return to a residual materi- alism arises.
This brings us to a further, and closely related, issue—the epistemological status of the claims Blyth makes about the US and Swedish cases, speciWcally, and those made by constructivists about institutional change more generally. Understand- ably, Blyth is keen to stress that his chosen constructivist brand of institutionalism provides us with a ‘‘better understanding of political change’’ than more conven- tional materialist modes of political analysis (2002, ix; see also Abdelal, Blyth, and Parsons 2005; Berman 1998). Yet it is not clear from the text why sceptics should accept such a view—largely because no sustained consideration is given to how one might adjudicate preferences between contending accounts (see, for instance, Bevir and Rhodes 2003). Nor is it clear that constructivists can easily claim the kind of epistemological self-conWdence required to pronounce the analytical superiority of their perspective. Presumably, ‘‘better’’ here means more complex, more nuanced, and more able to capture the rich texture of social, political, and economic interaction—in short, the standard that Blyth seems to construct is one of correspondence to an external reality. This is all very well, but external realities, as most constructivists would concede, can be viewed diVerently. Moreover, whilst complexity and correspondence can plausibly be defended as providing the standards by which competing theories should be adjudicated, parsimony, analytical purchase, and predictive capacity have arguably just as much claim to provide such a standard. And by that standard, most constructivist institutionalism is likely to be found wanting.
Constructivism has much to contribute to contemporary institutional analysis, though its appeal is likely to be greatest for those who do not believe that a predictive science of politics is possible. Yet whether its clear superiority to other contending positions has already been, or is ever likely to be, established, is another matter. Blyth’s concluding remarks are, in this respect, particularly problematic. The purpose of his book, he suggests, is ‘‘to demonstrate that large-scale institutional change cannot be understood from class alignments, materially given coalitions, or other structural prerequisites. . . . [I]nstitutional change only makes sense by refer- ence to the ideas that inform agents’ responses to moments of uncertainty and crisis’’ (2002, 251). This is a bold and almost certainly overstated claim. For, rather than demonstrating that structural prerequisites cannot inform a credible account of institutional change, constructivist institutionalism is perhaps better seen as dem- onstrating that alternative and compelling accounts can be constructed that do not restrict themselves to such material factors. Moreover, Blyth here seems to drive something of a wedge between the consideration of ideational and material factors in causal analysis. This is unfortunate, because as he at times seems quite happy to concede, there are almost certainly (some) material conditions of existence of ascendant crisis narratives and crises themselves would seem to have both material and ideational determinants. Ideational factors certainly need to be given greater attention, but surely not at the expense of all other variables.
As the above paragraphs hopefully suggest, whilst constructivist institutionalism has much to contribute to the analysis and, above all, the explanation of complex institutional change, it is still very much a work in progress. Its particular appeal resides in its ability to interrogate and open up the often acknowledged and yet rarely explored question of institutional dynamics under disequilibrium condi- tions. As a consequence of this focus, it has already gone some way to overcoming the new institutionalism’s characteristic failure to deal adequately with post- formative institutional change and its tendency to Wnd it rather easier to describe (and, even more so, to explain) path-dependent as opposed to path-shaping logics. Yet, in so doing, it has stumbled over other problems. In particular, it seems unclear whether constructivist institutionalists are prepared to abandon altogether the long association of interests and material factors in political analysis that they ostensibly challenge. Similarly, the extent to which constructivist institutionalism entails the substitution of material by ideational explanations, the development of explan- ations which dissolve the dualistic distinction between the two, or merely the addition of ideational variables to pre-existing material accounts remains unclear
Finally, there is still something of a tension it seems between the assuredness and conWdence with which the superiority of constructivist institutionalist insights are proclaimed and the theoretical modesty that a constructivist ontology and episte- mology would seem almost naturally to entail. None of these are fundamental impediments to the development of a fourth new institutionalism alongside the others; but they do provide a sense of the debates that must, and are likely to, animate the constructivist institutionalist research programme over the next decade.
