Immergut - The Theoretical Core of New Institutionalism
Immergut - The Theoretical Core of New Institutionalism
Immergut - The Theoretical Core of New Institutionalism
ELLEN
M. &
IMMERGUT
SOCIETY
ELLEN M. IMMERGUT
This article is a substantially revised version of The Normative Roots of the New Institutionalism:
Historical Institutionalism and Comparative Policy Studies, in Arthur Benz and Wolfgang Seibel, ed.,
Theorieentwicklung in der Politikwissenschafteine Zwischenbilanz (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1997), 325-55. I thank the editors and Nomos Verlag for their permission to excerpt
portions of the original article. For helpful comments on the manuscript, I thank Ira Katznelson and
his fellow members of the Politics and Society Editorial Board, as well as Kathleen Thelen.
POLITICS & SOCIETY, Vol. 26 No. 1, March 1998 5-34
1998 Sage Publications, Inc.
of these approaches, I will devote more space to its explication and critique. I will
neglect entirely a potential fourth approach, the new institutionalism in economics, because the theoretical core that I outline here is less applicable to this
particular variant of the new institutionalism.
II. BEHAVIORALISM
There are three aspects to the institutionalist critique of behavior. The first
questions the assumption that political behavior reveals preferences. For the
behavioralist, a persons true preferences cannot be ascertained. Therefore,
one must rely on that persons behavior to indicate those preferences. For all
intents and purposes, the expressed preferences are the real preferences of any
individual; preferences are revealed through behavior. Institutionalists, on the
other hand, are interested precisely in the distinction between expressed and
ELLEN M. IMMERGUT
real preferences.7 There may be any number of reasons why, under one particular set of circumstances, someone may make a political choice that deviates from
the choice the same individual, with the same preferences, would make under
other circumstances. For example, they may believe that the outcome they hope
for is not feasible and that they should therefore vote for an alternative that is not
their first choice but one that has the advantage of being realizable. Or, the true
interests of individuals or groups may not be entirely clear. Institutionalists aim
to analyze why these actors choose one particular definition of their interests and
not some other equally plausible alternative. Definitions of interests are viewed
as political results that must be analyzed and not as starting points for political
action to be taken at face value. Thus, institutionalist theory aims to expose and
analyze the discrepancy between potential interests and those that come to be
expressed in political behavior.
Second, the institutionalist approach views the summation of preferences
or, for that matter, the aggregation of individual behaviors into collective
phenomenaas exceedingly problematic. Dahl himself notes that analysis of
individual preferences cannot fully explain collective decisions, for in addition
we need to understand the mechanisms by which individual decisions are aggregated and combined into collective decisions.8 Yet, whereas behavioral studies
assume that preferences can be aggregated and generally view mechanisms for
the aggregation of interests as perfectly efficient, the institutional approach
disputes the notion of aggregation itself. The separate branches of the new institutionalism reject the possibility of interest aggregation for different reasons
which will be discussed in more detail belowbut they all agree that political
decisions cannot be based on the aggregation of individual preferences. For, on
this view, it is simply not possible to add interests together. Human interests are
so complex, that to speak of summing or aggregating them is merely applying a
metaphor to a complicated process. Mechanisms for aggregating interests do not
sum but in fact reshape interestsby developing new ideas through discussions
and getting some persons to redefine their preferences, by selecting out some
interests at the expense of others, or by reducing a multifaceted set of issues to
two alternatives that can be voted on.9 Thus, mechanisms for collective decisions
do not measure the sum of individual preferences. Instead, they allow us to reach
decisions, even where there may be no clear-cut consensus.
To put this point more concretely, let us consider the relationship between
voters and public policy. If voters could freely express their full views on every
policy issue, the result would more likely be a chaos of opinions than a policy
consensus. Political procedures, like rules for holding referenda or electing
representatives, but also practices like dividing legislatures into specialized
jurisdictions or leaving the informational burden of policy to experts, put limits
on the political process that allow decisions to be made, even where there is no
natural equilibrium of preferences.10
Table 1
Behavioralism versus Institutionalism
Preferences (Xi)
Aggregation ( Xi)
Behavioralism Subjective
Efficient summation equilibrium
Revealed through (e.g., interest group market)
behavior (e.g.,
voting)
Institutionalism True expressed
Inefficient aggregation
preferences
Equilibrium problems
(problem with Xi) outcomes/decisions Xi
(problem with Xi)
Normative Standard
Utilitarian:
Xi = public interest/
common good
Rejects utilitarian
standard
Xi public interest
Assessment of bias
Eradication of bias
Common good = ??
ELLEN M. IMMERGUT
of politics but as products of societyits norms and its institutions. Law and
custom shaped mens preferences and institutionalized power and privilege, thus
converting natural inequalities into more pernicious social inequalities.12 To
discover the true nature of man, untainted by the social order, one would have
to imagine men in a presocial state, stripped of all effects of social intercourse
and even language. To restore the natural freedom of man under modern conditions, Rousseau proposed the social contract. Such a contract would allow men
to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole
common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while
uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as
before.13
Institutionsmost centrally the law and the constitutionthus play a dual
role. They constrain and corrupt human behavior. Yet, they provide the means of
liberation from the social bond. Social institutions do not embody mans fundamental nature. Instead, as artifacts of history (in this case, of the civilizing
process), institutions induce particular behaviors. Being creations of man, however, they can be transformed by politics. Political institutions can be reworked
to function more justly, and political decisions made within these institutions will
alter social institutions so as to produce better citizens. New laws could reform
property rights or the educational system, for instance, thereby causing citizens
to think more about the common good and less about their personal possessions.
Most germane for contemporary institutionalists are Rousseaus arguments
about the ways in which the organization of the political process will influence
the quality and justness of political decisions. Just as mens preferences are
products of particular social and institutional environments, so too do political
decisions emerge from a particular set of institutional procedures that may shape
or distort those decisions. Depending on how individual wills are polled for
collective decisions, the final results may reflect the common good, or they may
be distorted.
Rousseau raises the problem of aggregating interests in his famous passage on
the distinction between the general will and the will of all.
There is often a great deal of difference between the will of all and the general will; the
latter considers only the common interest, while the former takes private interest into
account, and is no more than a sum of particular wills: but take away from these same wills
the pluses and minuses that cancel one another, and the general will remains as the sum of
the differences.14
10
How then is the general will to be ascertained? Rousseaus procedural instructions may be interpreted in various ways. His admonitions against partial
associations and communication among the citizenry, as well as his preference
that each citizen should express only his own opinion, indicate a plebiscitary
process by which citizens vote individually on issues, isolated from one another,
and protected from political parties and interest groups.15 On the other hand, his
image of the sum of the differences as being in some sense orthogonal to the
pluses and minuses of particular wills, as well as his stress on unanimitybut a
unanimity that requires political conflict16indicate a deliberative or discursive
process by which public discussion will allow citizens to find a common ground
and reach consensus on the public good. In this second view, issues and interests
are qualitatively transformed through discussion, allowing a mutual interest to
emerge. Here, interests may be said to be integrated rather than aggregated.17
Nevertheless, while plausible cases for particular interpretations can be made,
the fact remains that Rousseaus institutional formula is undeniably obscure. This
is not merely a question of lack of clarity on Rousseaus part but is indicative of
a fundamental problem of the institutionalist perspective. Institutionalist analysis
focuses on showing how preferences and decisions are artifacts of institutions.
Institutional rules and procedures distort preferences and decisions in various
ways. But if preferences are distorted, what are the true preferences of individuals? Whereas the behavioralist tradition finesses this question by assuming that
persons reveal their preferences through their behavior, the institutionalist tradition cannot accept this assumption. Avaricious behavior in a particular historical
and social setting is for Rousseau no proof of mans avaricious nature. But in
trying to reach back to find mans fundamental nature, he can make only a few
hypothetical weak assumptions, assumptions that are in any case irrelevant for
mans civilized state. Yet, one needs some such standard for judging how badly
particular institutions distort political behaviors and political decisions and for
deciding what steps are necessary to correct these distortions.
The institutional traditions search for such a standard is thus made difficult
because institutionalists eschew both behavioralist and social determinist approaches to making normative judgments about the quality of political preferences
and outcomes. Behavioral approaches assume preferences to be subjective givens
and then accept an equilibrium of interests as being just by definition, as long as
minimal conditions are met.18 In other words, the fairness of the political process
substitutes for any overarching judgment about the results; the behavioral approach adopts an a posteriori standard of justice. Social determinist approaches,
by contrast, adopt standards of justice based on objective interests, such as those
stemming from class, gender, or social position.19 Theories of social structure and
social justicesuch as marxismprovide a vantage point for critical scrutiny
both of the preferences that come to be expressed in politics and of the outcomes
that result from the political process, such as patterns in the class origins of elected
ELLEN M. IMMERGUT
11
The same basic theoretical assumptions and normative conundrum are present
in contemporary institutionalist theories and projects. To demonstrate that this
12
Table 2
Institutional Approach Contrasted with Other Paradigms
Liberal
Institutional
Behavioralist/
Utilitarian
Social
Determinist/Marxist
Interests
Diverse sources of
individual and collective
interests; institutions
influence their
articulation and
expression in politics
Subjective: preferences
revealed through
behavior; each individual
best judges of his or her
interests
Objective: social
group/class based
Political process
Problem of aggregation;
form of process affects
quality and results of
participation
Correspond to
social/class
structure
Normative
Procedural democracy:
substantive justice
through formal
procedure
Formal democracy:
fairness of process
guarantees justness of
results: formally open
access to markets/
politics; competition
protected
Substantive
democracy: Social
harmony-organic
solidarity/end of
class exploitation
Example
Rousseau, Kant,
Montesquieu, Toqueville,
(J. S. Mill), Weber,
Habermas, Rawls,
Theodore J. Lowi
Durkheim, Marx
a. Hobbes, Locke, and Smith share many elements but are more concerned with institutional issues.
common core can indeed be found in all three branches of the new institutionalism,
I will consider rational choice, organizational theory, and historical institutionalism in turn.
The rational choice perspective can be defined as the analysis of the choices
made by rational actors under conditions of interdependence. That is, it is the study
of strategic action of rational actors, using tools such as game theory. Applied to
political action, much of this theorylargely developed by William Riker and his
studentshas been focused on the implications of the Arrow impossibility
theorem (or Condorcet Paradox). Because multidimensional preferences cannot
be ordered in such a way as to result in stable political choices, majority rule is
inherently flawed. Any proposition that can garner a majority of votes can be
beaten by an alternative proposition with an alternative majority (unless very
restrictive conditions are met).24
How then should we understand and interpret political choices? Institutions,
such as the rules that determine the sequence of congressional votes, or the
ELLEN M. IMMERGUT
13
14
political institutions and outcomes. Elster, for instance, says that rational choice
theory
just tells us to do what will best promote our aims, whatever they are. The only part of the
theory that is somewhat controversial from the normative viewpoint is that which deals
with rational desires. Note, however, that it is hard to think of any other theory of what we
ought to desire that is excluded by the idea that desires ought to be rational, in the sense
of being satisfiable.27
If this means that actors, squeezed by the rules of the game into making choices
that deviate from their ideal preferences, should focus on changing the rules of
the game, institutionalists can endorse this view. But this does not seem to be the
emphasis of most rational choice theorists. Elsters view risks making the instrumental rationality of a particular institutional setting into a universal arbiter of
justice. Or, to take a second example, Buchanan and Tullock promote unanimity
as a decision rule, combined with the buying of votes, as an institutional setup
that results in the most efficient maximization of individual utilities. It is not clear,
however, if such thinking can really be applied to nondivisible or nonredistributive issues, and, more important, the reliance on utility maximization seems to
constitute a return to the behavioralist perspective that the institutionalists set out
to criticize.28
William Riker, on the other hand, does not attempt to join his institutionalist
critique with a utilitarian normative standard. Based on his analysis of distortions
in the expression and aggregation of preferences, Riker argues that democracy
cannot ascertain the true popular will. Instead, popular votes express a mixture of
preferences, strategies, and institutional effects. Far from providing infallible
guidelines for government action (that can then be used to force us to be free),
this witches brew must be held in check by institutional constraints that guarantee
turnover in government and provide dissenters with many opportunities for
political veto. Thus, in his normative conclusions, Riker returns to the impossibility theorem from which he set out.29 While extremely consistent, however, the
conclusion that the popular will is unfathomable means in effect abandoning the
search for substantive standards and adopting an anti-interventionist political
stance.
VI. ORGANIZATION THEORY
ELLEN M. IMMERGUT
15
Table 3
Institutionalisms Common Core
Preferences
Aggregation
Aggregation
problematic
Normative
Institutionalism
Preferences
problematic
Rational choice
Institutions = decision
rules
Alternative
rationalities
Construction of
interests
Representation of
interests
Contestation/power
Contextual logics
of causality
Contingency
Rejects utilitarian
standard ( Xi)
Rejects social
structural standard (S)
Search for procedural
standard (P)
I
Xi rejected
P = organizational
learning
I
Xi rejected
S creeps back in
P = deliberation
the various coping devices that individuals adopt to overcome their cognitive
limits. Not only are the same cognitive processes relevant for aggregating individual acts into organizational decisions, but they are central to understanding
how coordinated action of anarchic individuals is even possible.
Over time, this schools critique of rationality became increasingly radical.
Whereas the concept of bounded rationality introduced limits on choice procedures, the garbage can model went further by dropping all causal links between
problems and solutions, viewing them as meeting randomly.31 Another step was
taken with the concept of institutional scriptsactors retrospectively assign a
rationale to their actions from sets of preexisting scenarios to understand what
they have done.32
Current accounts of the new institutionalism in organization theory accordingly stress the importance of symbolic codes and the role of institutions in
generating meaning, as well as norms and appropriateness as a category of
action.33 Lynne Zucker, for example, shows how cultural categories, such as
concepts of roles and hierarchy, influence perception and, therefore, behavior.34
Neil Fligstein explains changes in management strategies not just as responses to
changed economic environments but to changes in the perceptual lenses through
which different generations of firm leaders interpreted these changes.35
16
Structural-Power Antecedents
As DiMaggio and Powell point out, organization theory is intertwined with the
sociological tradition.37 Durkheim first proposed the sociological variant of the
idea that categories of thought precede thought and that these categories are social
or cultural constructs.38 And Max Weber, of course, was one of the first to theorize
about the importance of organizational structures in his theory of political domination. The historical institutionalists draw on the same sociological tradition and,
in particular, on the work of Weber. But whereas organization theorists stress
cognitive limits on rationality and the ways in which organizational rules and
procedures coordinate the action of independent individuals, the historical institutionalists focus more squarely on the themes of power and interests.
Renewed interest in Weberor, more accurately, in rediscovering particular
aspects of his thought, as many scholars in the behavioralist period, such as Talcott
Parsons, were equally interested in his workswas a response both to the
ELLEN M. IMMERGUT
17
18
Table 4
Types of New Institutionalists: Similarities and Differences
Rational Choice
Interests
Political
process
Organization Theory
Historical Institutionalism
Actors interpretations of
Strategic factors cause rational Actors do not know their
their interests shaped by
interests, limits of time and
actors to choose suboptimal
collective organizations
information cause them to
equilibria (e.g., prisoners
rely on sequencing and other and institutions that bear
dilemma, tragedy of the
traces of own history
processing rules (bounded
commons)
rationality)
Inter- and intraorganizational Political process structured
Without rules for ordering,
by constitutions and
processes shape outcomes,
cannot arrive at public
political institutions, state
as in garbage can model,
interest; rules for sequence
structures, state-interest
efforts to achieve
of congressional votes,
group relations, policy
administrative reorganpartitioning into
networks, contingencies
ization, and policy
jurisdictions, etc., affects
of timing
implementation
outcomes
Perrow: implications of
bureaucratic power and
bounded rationality
Actors
Cognitively bounded
Self-reflective (social,
cultural, and historical
norms, but reinvention of
tradition)
Power
Depends on position in
organizational hierarchy
Depends on recognition by
state, access to decision
making, political
representation, and
mental constructs
Structuring of options,
calculation of interests,
and formation of goals by
rules, structures, norms,
and ideas
Normative
ELLEN M. IMMERGUT
19
20
Table 5
Historical Institutionalism: Some Characteristic Features and Examples
Preference Construction
Contextual Causality
Contingent Development
Structural
Steinmo
Moe
Katznelson
Skocpol
Interpretive
Hattam
Lehmbruch
Hall
Thelen/Locke
Weir
Sabel/Zeitlin/Herrigel
ELLEN M. IMMERGUT
21
their perception of the possibilities for change and, hence, their assessment of the
best course of action.52
Not only may political institutions, political authorities, and political culture
play a critical role in the definition, mobilization, and organization of interests,
but the structure of political opportunities will shape the strategies of organized
interests and their beliefs regarding the efficacy of different types of political
action. Sven Steinmo, for example, shows how the constitutional structures left
in place by different processes of democratization in the United States, Sweden,
and Britain continue to exert strong effects on tax policy. Political actors in these
three countries shared a preference for lower taxes but behaved differently
because the logics of the political systems made different political strategies more
likely to achieve success. Institutions, writes Steinmo, provide the context in
which individuals interpret their self-interest and thereby define their policy
preferences. . . . And any rational actor will behave differently in different institutional contexts.53 In this case, the logic of these political systems influenced
the means but not the ends of political action.
Victoria Hattam uses a similar comparative historical strategy to show the
relation between institutions and the goals of political actors.54 In her account, two
factors are critical in explaining the development of business unionism or
voluntarism in the United States. Over the course of the nineteenth century,
working mens associations changed their conception of self from a vision of
themselves as producersaligned with other productive classes such as
skilled craftsmen and manufacturers, against nonproducing bankers, lawyers,
and land speculatorsto a new collective identity as workers. With this shift,
the labor movement turned its energies toward improving labor legislation,
employing political strategies, and seeking to achieve political goals that were
quite similar to the strategies and goals of the British labor movement. Although
both movements achieved similar legislative gains, however, the American victories were nullified as the courts overturned the decisions made by state legislatures. Consequently, American labor leaders concluded that political action was
not a promising strategy and focused their energies almost exclusively on shopfloor bargaining and collective action. Thus, institutional differences can explain
why the similarly constructed interests of the two labor movements ultimately
diverged.
Gerhard Lehmbruchs work on the German reunification uses a historical
approach to explain which interests among variously articulated alternatives
actually win out.55 He compares the ease with which West German institutional
arrangements were transferred to the East in different economic sectors. Interestingly, in most cases that he studies, there were potentially viable, innovative
alternatives to the simple imposition of West German practices to the East, and
there were often even East-West coalitions of actors that supported these changes.
Purely coincidental factorssuch as the legalization of the property rights of
22
ELLEN M. IMMERGUT
23
and institutional practices survived intact until radicals in the Carter and Reagan
administrations repoliticized the nominations process.
Peter Halls study of the change from Keynesianism to monetarism under
Thatcher shows how the construction of a new political actor changed the context
for British executive institutions and, thereby, the balance of power between prime
minister and treasury.60 As part of a series of financial deregulation measures,
interest rates were allowed to fluctuate more widely, inadvertently affecting the
market for government debt (the gilt market) and, in the process, its political
consequences. Investors began to buy and sell in a more coordinated manner and
developed an interest in being able to predict interest rate fluctuations. This
interest stimulated the founding of new economic research institutes, newsletters,
and other forms of communication within this community. This new informational
network disseminated monetarist ideas and, more important, created a new
collective actor, the Cityor at least rejuvenated an old oneand gave individual investors a new role as part of a community with new institutional anchors.
These developments helped to effect a shift in the balance of power, aiding
Thatcher in her efforts to override the treasury (which had always championed
Keynesianism in the past) by allowing her to legitimize her own support for
monetarism with the interests of the City. This analysis of the emergence of such
a distended, nonformally organized collective actor is not only extremely innovative but provides a model that can be followed in trying to understand the
increasingly important impact of market actors.
Contingent Relations between
Explanatory Elements
Almost every one of the studies mentioned so far leaves some scope for
historical contingency. Rather than following a logical and efficient trajectory,
history is marked by accidents of timing and circumstance. These may leave
lasting legacies, but such legacies are equally vulnerable to unexpected change.
Ira Katznelsons analysis of American working-class formation in the nineteenth
century posits a structural gap that arose because political parties organized on
the basis of neighborhoods, while unions organized at the workplace, which,
because of the scattered patterns of settlement in the United States, were often far
removed from residences. This coincidence of the effects of early democratization
on political parties and the effects of residential and industrial zoning and
settlement patterns on union organizing caused the politics of class at the workplace to be completely severed from party politics. This effectively impeded the
emergence of social democratic political parties and created an urban politics that
was constructed on issues of ethnicity rather than class.61
Sequence and contingency have also been emphasized in many studies of the
welfare state. Drawing on Shefters analysis of the impact of the relative sequence
24
of democratization and bureaucratization on political parties (producing patronage parties where democratization was first, as in the United States, and programmatic parties where bureaucratization was first, as in Germany), Skocpol and
Orloff argue that these differences in state structure can explain differences in
welfare state development between the United States and Britain.62 In her more
recent work, Skocpol has developed the historicist perspective even further,
arguing that when viewed from its own frame of reference, the American welfare
state does not appear as a laggard of the European social democratic model but
as a unique configuration of programs and agencies forged from political struggles
within particular political institutions.63
Several other recent studies break with mono-causal and determinist theories
about the welfare state, stressing instead unique and contingent developments that
cannot be consistently compared across cases. Peter Baldwin has demonstrated
that the working-class power (or laborist, as he calls it) interpretation of the
welfare state does not do justice to the complexity of the politics of the welfare
state.64 Frank Nullmeier and Friedbert Rb have argued that the Catholic tradition
has played a larger role in German pension policy than has been previously
recognized.65 Margaret Weir has shown how U.S. unemployment policy was
shaped by rare moments of political opportunity in which ideas, interests, and
political coalitions crystallized around what she calls policy packages. Once the
policy ideas and political coalitions (such as the link between the war on poverty
with Democratic Party efforts to reach African American voters to balance
defecting Southern Democrats) were joined, however, their fusion outlived their
political usefulness, impeding future efforts at reform.66 Similarly, Susan Pedersen
has stressed the fit between ideas and political opportunities in explaining the
different trajectories of British and French family policy.67
Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin, as well as Gary Herrigel, have developed
one of the most consistent perspectives on historical contingency. Reexamining
the history of industrialization, Sabel and Zeitlin have found evidence for widespread experimentation with industrial districts, which they define as craft-based
alternatives to mass production, organized around cooperative networks of small
firms employing highly skilled workers. In some cases, these experiments failed
for lack of nerve, given producers imagined certainty that mass production was
the wave of the future; in others, they were eliminated only by national industrial
policies, equally based on assumptions rather than proof of the direction of future
technological progress. Sabel and Zeitlin therefore argue that the eventual dominance of mass production should be viewed not as the result of technological and
market imperatives but as the consequence of political struggle, that is, as the
result of some implicit collective choice, arrived at in the obscurity of unaccountable small conflicts, which they summarize as accidents of the struggle for
power.68 Herrigel applies this perspective to the German case, deconstructing the
Gerschenkronian interpretation of the German model and marshalling evidence
ELLEN M. IMMERGUT
25
This essay has tried to make the point that, for all their differences, the several
varieties of new institutionalists address a common set of problems from a unified
perspective. All are concerned with the difficulties of ascertaining what human
actors want when the preferences expressed in politics are so radically affected
by the institutional contexts in which these preferences are voiced. Rather than
tackling this question by probing individual psychology, these scholars have
turned to analyzing the effects of rules and procedures for aggregating individual
wishes into collective decisionswhether these rules and procedures are those
of formal political institutions, voluntary associations, firms, or even cognitive or
interpretive frameworks.
Since the common research interest is the black box between potential political
demands and ultimate outcomes, it does not make sense to predefine the contents
of this box. A standard definition of institution is thus not desirable; the common
research agenda is the study of institutional effects wherever, or however, they
occur.
How well, then, does the historical institutionalism address this theoretical
core? All of the examples show in various ways that historical work can provide
answers to institutionalist questions. By tracing changing definitions of interests
through time and across cultures, the impact of institutions on the construction of
interests can be studied without imposing arbitrary, objective definitions of
interests. That is, the discrepancy between potential and expressed preferences can be addressed without inventing a theory of the actors true interests.
In this way, artifacts of representation and biases of political institutions can be
discussed and criticized.
The historical approach thus provides a fruitful avenue for a return to the
normative issues central to the institutionalist paradigm. Public policy is not
assumed to be an efficient outcome of the aggregation of individual preferences,
technological progress and market forces, a free-for-all of ideas, or even of the
26
ELLEN M. IMMERGUT
27
history seems less compelling. Most socialists throughout Europe and North
America (and all state socialist regimes) came up with the idea of socializing
medicine, regardless of their histories. And most doctors associations feared
being employed by government or social security monopsonies. Whether any of
these actors knew their objective interests is not the pointthey may equally well
have been guided by a common narrative of the Manichean struggle between
capitalism and socialism. But the nationally specific historical explanations are
damaged by the cross-national evidence, nevertheless. Without a sufficiently
broad comparative perspective, historical institutionalists risk overstating the
uniqueness of their case. Furthermore, it is difficult to see how such historical
narratives can ever be proved wrong.
Second, historical institutionalists profit somewhat unfairly from the positive
models that they criticize. This is particularly true of marxism and other sociological theories of interests. Following the example set by Webers Protestant
Ethic, many historical institutionalist works organize their arguments as an attack
on a dominant model, such as a system of class relations restricted to the objective
categories of capital and labor, the marxist theory of revolution, the Smithian
account of the division of labor and the rise of capitalism, and so forth. It is
certainly legitimate to knock down a dominant model by showing where the facts
do not fit and providing a superior interpretation. But these interpretations are not
always exposed to similar critical competition because they are formulated to be
inextricable from their original context. In addition, from a normative perspective,
this leaves the historical institutionalists wavering between the moral anarchy of
postmodernismthis branch of the new institutionalisms version of the impossibility theoremand falling back into the social determinists reduction of social
justice to the coordinates of the social structure.
Third, in eschewing systematization, the historical institutionalists undercut
the cumulative impact of their work. To be sure, the eclecticism and diffuseness
of the historical institutionalist school are, to an extent, unavoidable. Many studies
have been motivated by substantive issues rather than a narrow theoretical
program. Furthermore, the historicist stress on indeterminacy and uniqueness
mitigates against theory building. Nevertheless, it would be a shame to overlook
important areas where knowledge has indeed been cumulative. Charles Tillys
demolition of the relative deprivation view has changed the dominant assumptions
that not just historical institutionalists, but nearly all scholars of social movements, bring to the study of collective action.71 Theda Skocpols analysis of
revolutions as breakdowns in state structures is a similarly paradigmatic work.72
Suzanne Bergers Peasants against Politics sets forth theoretical and methodological guidelines for a more constructivist view.73 Notably, the potential for
articulating a more positive theoretical profile is rooted in the structural-power
legacy of this group. The historical institutionalists should remember that this
traditions emphasis on power is as important as its sensitivity to interpretation.
28
1. For important reviews, see James G. March and Johan P. Olsen, Rediscovering
Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics (New York: Free Press, 1989); Paul J.
DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, eds., The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Sven Steinmo, Kathleen Thelen, and Frank
Longstreth, eds., Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). See also Robert H. Bates, Contra
Contractarianism: Some Reflections on the New Institutionalism, Politics and Society 16,
no. 2-3 (June-September 1988): 387-401; G. John Ikenberry, Conclusion: An Institutional
Approach to American Foreign Economic Policy, International Organization 42, no. 1
(winter 1988): 219-43; David Brian Robertson, The Return to History and the New
Institutionalism in American Political Science, Social Science History 17, no. 1 (spring
ELLEN M. IMMERGUT
29
30
11. The philosophers, who have inquired into the foundations of society, have all felt
the necessity of going back to a state of nature; but not one of them has got there. . . . Every
one of them, in short, constantly dwelling on wants, avidity, oppression, desires, and pride,
has transferred to the state of nature ideas which were acquired in society; so that, in
speaking of the savage, they described the social man. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A
Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, in The Social Contract and Discourses, trans.
G.D.H. Cole (London: Everyman, 1993 [1755]), 50.
12. Ibid., 97, 99.
13. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract in The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. G.D.H. Cole (London: Everyman, 1993 [1762]), 191.
14. Ibid., 203.
15. Ibid., 203, 204.
16. [T]he agreement of all interests is formed by opposition to that of each. If there
were no different interests, the common interest would be barely felt, as it would encounter
no obstacle; all would go on of its own accord, and politics would cease to be an art. Ibid.,
203.
17. See James G. March and Johan P. Olsen, Popular Sovereignty and the Search for
Appropriate Institutions, Journal of Public Policy 6, no. 4 (October-December 1986):
341-70; and Elster, The Market and the Forum.
18. Trumans concept of interest group balance as being not only empirically but
normatively the best possible determinant of government policyas long as multiple
memberships and potential interests protect the rules of the gameis a paradigmatic
example of this approach. See The Governmental Process, particularly chap. 16.
19. For a discussion of subjective and objective interests that has influenced the point
of view presented here, see Isaac D. Balbus, The Concept of Interest in Pluralist and
Marxian Analysis, Politics and Society 1 (1971): 151-77.
20. The essence of the Poulantzas-Miliband debate was an argument about whether
the capitalist state should be analyzed by looking at the class origins of politicians and
bureaucrats or at the impact of their decisions on the various classes that make up the
capitalist system. Both theorists were united, however, in their criticism of liberal and
pluralist approaches that (a) accept preferences as subjective givens without analyzing
these preferences in terms of objective class interests and (b) accept the results of the
political process as engendering a just equilibrium of these individual, subjective preferences rather than scrutinizing political outcomes for class bias. Nicos Poulantzas and Ralph
Miliband, The Problem of the Capitalist State, in Robin Blackburn, ed., Ideology in
Social Science (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 238-62.
21. For a discussion, see Ernst Fraenkel, Deutschland und die westlichen Demokratien,
3d ed. (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1964), 165-89. Normative principles, rather than
objective theories of interests, can also, of course, serve as the basis for a priori theories.
Here, however, I concentrate on the divisions that have been most relevant for empirical
work (as opposed to normative theory) in the past thirty years.
22. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution (New York:
Doubleday, 1955 [1856]), 97-98, 204-5. Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 5th ed.,
ed. Johannes Winckelmann (Tbingen: JCB Mohr Paul Siebeck, 1980 [1922]), 851-68.
English translation: Economy and Society, 2 vols., ed. and trans. Guenther Roth and Claus
Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 1381-1462.
23. Of Jrgen Habermass works, Strukturwandel der ffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen
zu einer Kategorie der brgerlichen Gesellschaft (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1962) is
perhaps most easily linked to this institutionalist debate. John Rawlss A Theory of Justice
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971) is unusual in this regard because he provides
ELLEN M. IMMERGUT
31
not only a procedural approach but makes claims about the substantive content of the rules
of justice that would emerge from the original position. Granted, the equal basic rights
and difference principles are still in a sense procedural, but Rawls goes further than most
institutionalists in specifying outcomes. Now that I have mentioned Rawls, I should clarify
that, although there is an obvious overlap between these institutionalist themes and the
debate between liberals and communitarians, the correspondence is not exact. The
development of theory through empirical research has brought the institutionalists along
a different trajectory since individuals viewed empirically cannot be separated from their
communities, and existing political results produced by various procedures can be evaluated using substantive standards. On the communitarians see, for example, Michael
Walzer, The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism, Political Theory 18, no. 1 (1990):
6-23. On juridical democracy, see Theodore J. Lowi, The End of Liberalism: The Second
Republic of the United States, 2d ed. (New York: Norton, 1979).
24. William H. Riker, Implications from the Disequilibrium of Majority Rule for the
Study of Institutions, American Political Science Review 74, no. 2 (June 1980): 432-47.
25. Shepsle, Institutional Equilibrium and Equilibrium Institutions.
26. Exceptions that include societal interests in rational choice analyses are John Mark
Hansen, Choosing Sides: The Creation of an Agricultural Policy Network in Congress,
1919-1932, Studies in American Political Development 2 (1987): 183-229; Daniel
Verdier, The Politics of Trade Preference Formation: The United States from the Civil
War to the New Deal, Politics and Society 3, no. 4 (December 1993): 365-92; Jack Knight,
Institutions and Social Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
27. Elster, Introduction, 22.
28. James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent: Logical
Foundations of Constitutional Democracy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1962). For a critique of rational choice theory along these lines, see Rogers Smith, Political
Jurisprudence, the New Institutionalism, and the Future of Public Law, American
Political Science Review 82, no. 1 (March 1988): 89-108.
29. William H. Riker, Liberalism against Populism: A Confrontation between the
Theory of Democracy and the Theory of Social Choice (San Francisco: Freeman, 1982),
233-53.
30. Herbert A. Simon, Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-Making Processes in Administrative Organization, 2d ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1957 [1945]); James
G. March and Herbert A. Simon, Organizations (New York: John Wiley, 1958).
31. Michael P. Cohen, James G. March, and Johan P. Olsen, A Garbage Can Model
of Organizational Choice, in James G. March, ed., Decisions and Organizations (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1988 [1972]), 294-334.
32. Michael D. Cohen and James G. March, Leadership and Ambiguity: The American
College President, 2d ed. (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1974), 81.
33. March and Olsen, Rediscovering Institutions; Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W.
Powell, Introduction, in Powell and DiMaggio, eds., The New Institutionalism in
Organizational Analysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 1-38; Roger
Friedland and Robert R. Alford, Bringing Society Back In: Symbols, Practices, and
Institutional Contradictions, in Powell and DiMaggio, eds., The New Institutionalism in
Organizational Analysis, 232-63.
34. Lynne G. Zucker, The Role of Institutionalism in Cultural Persistence, in Powell
and DiMaggio, eds., The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, 83-107.
35. Neil Fligstein, The Structural Transformation of American Industry: An Institutional Account of the Causes of Diversification in the Largest Firms, 1919-1979, in Powell
and DiMaggio, eds., The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, 311-36.
32
36. Charles Perrow, Complex Organizations: A Critical Essay, 3d ed. (New York:
Random House, 1986), esp. chap. 8.
37. DiMaggio and Powell, Introduction.
38. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. J. W. Swain
(New York: Free Press), 13-33.
39. For more extended discussions, see Kathleen Thelen and Sven Steinmo, Historical
Institutionalism in Comparative Politics, in Steinmo, Thelen, and Longstreth, eds.,
Structuring Politics, 1-32; and Robertson, The Return to History.
40. This literature is too well known (and too extensive) to be adequately handled in
a footnote, but some important works are Barrington Moore Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston:
Beacon, 1966); Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso Editions,
1974); Robert R. Alford and Roger Friedland, Political Participation and Public Policy,
Annual Review of Sociology 1 (1975): 429-79; Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of
National States in Western Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975); Peter
J. Katzenstein, ed., Between Power and Plenty: Foreign Economic Policies of Advanced
Industrial States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978); Philippe C. Schmitter
and Gerhard Lehmbruch, eds., Trends towards Corporatist Intermediation (London: Sage,
1979); Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France,
Russia, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Berger, Organizing
Interests in Western Europe; Stephen D. Krasner, Approaches to the State: Alternative
Conceptions and Historical Dynamics, Comparative Politics 16, no. 2 (January 1984):
223-46; Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the
State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Ira Katznelson and Aristide
R. Zollberg, eds., Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western
Europe and the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). The States
and Social Structures Newsletter, sponsored by the Social Science Research Council, was
an effort to provide a forum for scholars working along these lines.
41. Theodore J. Lowi, The End of Liberalism. In Building a New American State: The
Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1982), Steven Skowronek develops this argument further by focusing
more deeply on the historical roots of Americas constitutional dilemma regarding the
expansion of executive power.
42. This is also one of the key emphases of Renate Mayntz and Fritz W. Scharpfs
research program for the Max-Planck-Institut fr Gesellschaftsforschung in Cologne. See
their essay, Der Ansatz des akteurzentrierten Institutionalismus, in Mayntz and Scharpf,
eds., Gesellschaftliche Selbstregulierung und politische Steuerung (Frankfurt am Main:
Campus Verlag, 1995), 39-72.
43. Max Weber, Die protestantische Ethik: Eine Aufsatzsammlung, ed. J. Winckelmann
(Tbingen: J.C.B. Mohr/Paul Siebeck, 1965 [1920]). Anthropological approaches have
been very influential in encouraging this relativistic approach to rationality. See, in
particular, Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973);
James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1976). For criticisms, see Elster, Introduction, 23-24, and Samuel Popkin, The
Political Economy of Peasant Society, 197-247, in Elster, Rational Choice.
44. Webers economic analyses are good examples of such contextual models. See
Gesammelte Aufstze zur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, ed. M. Weber (Tbingen:
J.C.B. Mohr/Paul Siebeck, 1988 [1924]). For efforts to develop research methods that treat
these problems, see Charles Ragin, The Comparative Method (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1987); Andrew Abbott, Conceptions of Time and Events in Social
ELLEN M. IMMERGUT
33
Science Methods: Causal and Narrative Approaches, Historical Methods 23, no. 4 (fall
1990): 140-50; and Abbott, From Causes to Events: Notes on Narrative Positivism,
Sociological Methods and Research 20, no. 4 (May 1992): 428-55.
45. Gnther Roth argues that Webers typologies were always meant as concepts to be
used in an active analysis of a particular case. If one accepts his reading, the continuity of
the historical institutionalists with Weber is even stronger. Introduction, in Max Weber,
Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, 2 vols., ed. Roth and Claus
Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978 [1968]), xxxviii.
46. On the efficiency of history, March and Olsen, Rediscovering Institutions, 7-8. On
past possibilities and alternatives for the future, see Michael J. Piore and Charles F. Sabel,
The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity (New York: Basic Books, 1984);
Perrow, Complex Organizations, 273-78.
47. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993
[1946]).
48. The concept of identity was first coined by Alessandro Pizzorno, Political
Exchange and Collective Identity in Industrial Conflict, in Colin Crouch and Pizzorno,
eds., The Resurgence of Class Conflict in Western Europe Since 1968 (London: Macmillan,
1978), 277-98. See also Craig Calhoun, The Problem of Identity in Collective Action,
in Joan Huber, ed., Macro-Micro Linkages in Sociology (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1991),
51-75; Margaret R. Somers and Gloria D. Gibson, Reclaiming the Epistemological
Other: Narrative and the Social Constitution of Identity, in Craig Calhoun, ed., Social
Theory and the Politics of Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 37-99.
49. Grant McConnell, Private Power and American Democracy (New York: Vintage
Books/Random House, 1966); Lowi, End of Liberalism; Schmitter and Lehmbruch, Trends
towards Corporatist Intermediation; Berger, Organizing Interests in Western Europe.
50. Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, 144-47.
51. Ibid., 147.
52. Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency
1930-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 109.
53. Sven Steinmo, Taxation and Democracy: Swedish, British and American Approaches to Financing the Modern State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993),
7. I make a similar argument in Health Politics: Interests and Institutions in Western Europe
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
54. Victoria C. Hattam, Labor Visions and State Power: The Origins of Business
Unionism in the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). See also
Victoria C. Hattam, Institutions and Political Change: Working-Class Formation in
England and the United States, 1820-1896, in Steinmo, Thelen, and Longstreth, eds.,
Structuring Politics, 155-87.
55. Gerhard Lehmbruch, Sektorale Variationen in der Transformationsdynamik
der politischen konomie Ostdeutschlands und ihre situativen und institutionellen Bedingungen, in Wolfgang Seibel and Arthur Benz, eds., Regierungssystem und Verwaltungspolitik: Beitrge zu Ehren von Thomas Ellwein (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1995),
180-215.
56. Bo Rothstein uses a similar argument with regard to Swedish corporatism. Trust
between business and labor associations was built up over time through mutual cooperation
in the system of employment exchanges. Den korporativa staten: Interesseorganisationer
och statsfrvaltning i svensk politik (Stockholm: Norstedts, 1992). The English translation
(The Corporatist State) is forthcoming from Pittsburgh University Press. See also his
article, Labor Market Institutions and Working-Class Strength, in Steinmo, Thelen, and
Longstreth, eds., Structuring Politics, 33-56.
34
57. Douglas E. Ashford, The British and French Social Security Systems: Welfare
State by Intent and by Default, in Ashford and E. W. Kelley, eds., Nationalizing Social
Security (Greenwich, CT: JAI, 1986), 96-122.
58. Richard M. Locke and Kathleen Thelen, Apples and Oranges Revisited: Contextualized Comparisons and the Study of Comparative Labor Politics, Politics and Society
23, no. 3 (September 1995): 337-67.
59. Terry Moe, Institutions, Interests and Positive Theory: The Politics of the NLRB,
Studies in American Political Development 2 (1987): 236-99.
60. Peter A. Hall, The Movement from Keynesianism to Monetarism: Institutional
Analysis and British Economic Policy in the 1970s, in Steinmo, Thelen, and Longstreth,
eds., Structuring Politics, 90-113.
61. Ira Katznelson, City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the
United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
62. Ann Shola Orloff and Theda Skocpol, Why Not Equal Protection? Explaining the
Politics of Public Social Spending in Britain, 1900-1911, and the United States, 1880s1920, American Sociological Review 49, no. 6 (December 1984): 726-50.
63. Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social
Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
1992).
64. Peter Baldwin, The Politics of Social Solidarity and the Bourgeois Origins of the
European Welfare State, 1875-1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
65. Frank Nullmeier and Friedbert W. Rb, Die Transformation der Sozialpolitik: Vom
Sozialstaat zum Sicherungsstaat (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 1993).
66. Margaret Weir, Politics and Jobs: The Boundaries of Employment Policy in the
United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). See also her Ideas and
the Politics of Bounded Innovation, in Steinmo, Thelen, and Longstreth, eds., Structuring
Politics, 188-216.
67. Susan Pedersen, Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain
and France, 1914-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
68. Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin, Historical Alternatives to Mass Production:
Politics, Markets and Technology in Nineteenth-Century Industrialization, Past and
Present 108 (August 1985): 134, 139. See also their Stories, Strategies, Structures:
Rethinking Historical Alternatives to Mass Production, in Sabel and Zeitlin, eds., Worlds of
Possibility: Flexibility and Mass Production in Western Industrialization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press/Editions de la Maison des Sciences de lHomme, forthcoming).
69. Gary B. Herrigel, Industrial Constructions: The Sources of German Industrial
Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). For a similar constructivist view
on political economy, see Colleen A. Dunlavy, Politics and Industrialization: Early Railroads
in the United States and Prussia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
70. Collingwood, The Idea of History, 9-10, 215.
71. Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1978).
72. Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions.
73. Suzanne Berger, Peasants against Politics: Rural Organization in Brittany, 19111967 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972).
74. Hall and Taylor, Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms, 955-56.
See also Bates and Weingast, Rationality and Interpretation; Ira Katznelson, Structure
and Configuration in Comparative Politics, in Mark I. Lichbach and Alan S. Zuckerman,
eds., Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture, and Structure (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997); Atul Kohli, Introduction, World Politics 48 (October 1995):
1-2.