The search for the causes and agents of institutional change has had many epistemological consequences, not least of which was a new attention to ideas. In steady state, the ideas and assumptions that institutions incorporate tend to be taken for granted. But in times of crisis, new ideas are put forward and Wnd adherents. In economics, the ideational turn of the 1970s and 1980s discredited Keynsianism and promoted contending arguments mainly associated with the ‘‘Chicago School.’’ The new paradigm incorporated neoclassical theories about the greater eYciency of minimally regulated markets, and new theories about money supply (Eisner 1991; Hall 1989). In political science, a revived inXuence of economic ideas—pioneered after the Second World War by Kenneth Arrow, Mancur Olson, and Anthony Downs—augmented the popularity of a rational choice paradigm (RC) focused on individual preferences and utility maximizing strategies. (See Shepsle, this volume.) But, somewhat paradoxically, there was, at roughly the same time, a rebellion of social scientists and historians against the individual centered behaviorism that had dominated political science (most completely in the United States), and against its dominant paradigm, pluralism (see esp. Lowi 1969). The ‘‘normal’’ political science of the 1950s and 1960s, focused on contemporary (but well established) interest groups and individual attitudes (as measured by survey responses), was of little
help in understanding the apparent maladaptation of institutions after long periods of stability, or the challenge to institutions posed by the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
A major outcome of the 1960s–70s challenge to pluralism was the rediscovery of the importance of state institutions and their partial autonomy from civil society (that is, the perception that public institutions were much more than ‘‘black boxes’’ processing demands from society by turning them into policies). The attack on pluralism thus contributed importantly to the new Xowering of historical institutionalism (HI).
As it turned out, rational choice practitioners and historical institutionalists were largely in agreement on one essential deWnition and premise: that institutions constitute the ‘‘humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction’’ (North 1990). But the two schools diVer greatly in the object and timespan of their studies. For RC, it is the microcosmic game, the particular interaction of preference-holding, utility-seeking individuals within a set of (stable) institutional constraints (whether those are viewed as exogenous, or permeable and action- constructed) that is of interest, and RC borrowings are mainly from economics and mathematics.
For HI, what is mainly of interest is the construction, maintenance, and adapta- tion of institutions. HI scholars are not uninterested in individual preferences and the logic-driven, stylized way they might play out, but HI is more likely to deWne human motivation in terms of goals—which have a more public, less self-interested dimension—and in collective action, whether among executive oYcials, legislators, or social groups. RC (at least as perceived by HI) cares more about the abstracted game under the microscope, whereas HI is generally more concerned with the long-term evolution and outcome (intended or not) of a welter of interactions among goal-seeking actors, both within institutions, and with their challengers outside.
This attention to goals, collective action, outcomes, and persistence inevitably draws HI to ideas, and ideas are diVerent from the preferences or consciousness of rules with which RC is concerned. Ideas are relational, and often embody norma- tive a prioris. Whether or not ideas are mere abstractions from, or disguises for, individual preferences is less interesting to HI than the obvious fact that ideas serve as mobilizing forces for collective action by social groups that want to create or change institutions (Lieberman 2002, for example); and for institutional actors themselves, ideas serve as the glue that holds an administration, party, or agency together in its tasks, help to garner public support, and provide a standard to evaluate the institution’s policy outcomes.
It is a short step from concern with ideas and outcomes to concern with evaluative/normative questions about the ‘‘goodness’’ of particular institutions, or struggles to achieve a ‘‘good state.’’ HI scholars have a more normative, reformist bent than the studiously dispassionate and market-aYrming RC group (one
must interject here Polanyi’s now-classic observation that the decision to let markets determine outcomes is itself a normative choice, and that the apparatus of the presumably ‘‘free’’ and ‘‘natural’’ market takes a lot of deliberate constructing and coercive buttressing to survive).
The analysis of the RC fraternity, in Shepsle’s words, is ‘‘founded on abstraction, simpliWcation, analytical rigor, and an insistence on clean lines of analysis from basic axioms,’’ whereas most HI analysis is founded on dense, empirical description and inductive reasoning. A focus on interactive games draws RC to mathematics and economics, while interest in the construction, maintenance, and outcomes of institutions draws HI toward history and philosophy. The former proceed essentially through equations; the latter often count manifestations of behavior (and in fact have a stronger empirical bent than most RC exercises), but HI employs much more narrative in setting out its causal chains; and of course, its causal chains are much longer.
In sum, HI pays more attention to the long-term viability of institutions and their broad consequences; RC, to the parameters of particular moments in history that are the setting for individual self-interest maximization. As Paul Pierson (2004) has emphasized, RC takes preferences for granted, whereas HI is interested in how ideas, interests, and positions generate preferences, and how (and why) they evolve over time. There is no reason why the two approaches should be viewed as antithetical, however. They may well be complementary. The choice of focus between practitioners of RC and HI may be a matter of individual temperament and the assumptions and methodological aYnities that go with it, but the questions they ask may well be of mutual interest. That is certainly the case for the present writer.
