British Journal of Politics and International Relations,

Vol. 1, No. 3, October 1999, pp. 345365

The state of the discipline in

American political science:
be careful what you wish for?

MARK M. BLYTH AND ROBIN VARGHESE

Abstract
This article is an attempt to survey and analyse current developments in American political
science with particular reference to the current wave of institutionalist theory. The main
thrust of this article is to argue that the current concerns of the field are hardly new issues,
but rather perennial. We argue that the current state of the discipline is in many ways
more a function of recurrent intellectual dilemmas of a general social scientific nature than
they are about the particulars of the current debates in the field. Most relevant to a British
journal, we shall attempt to step outside the hermeneutic circle, and suggest which aspects
of contemporary American political science are most relevant to British political scientists.

This article is an attempt both to survey and analyse current developments

in American political science with particular reference to the current wave
of institutionalist theory. However, rather than simply review the literature
on the so-called new institutionalism, we propose to place the discussion of
institutional theory in its historical context.1 The current preoccupation
with the study of institutions is, as with many forms of social knowledge,
the product of an intellectual tradition, political concerns and policy failures. At the outset, we should note that we do not aim to critique American
political science by virtue of its origins. By now the genetic fallacy rarely
traps anyone and argument by way of genetic critique convinces even fewer.
None the less, in what follows we shall attempt two things.
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350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

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The main thrust of this article is to map the development of American

political science from its post-war beginnings to its present state.2 Such
a survey is necessarily both brief and unavoidably blunt. In particular, we
shall focus on the evolution of comparative politics as a distinct sub-field
within American political science. The point of doing so is two-fold. It suggests that the current concerns of the field are hardly new issues, but rather
perennial. The current concern with institutionalist theory in American
political science, in both its rationalist and historicist variants, has a long
lineage, which begins in the failure of modernisation theory in the late
1960s. Taken together, these two factors suggest that the current state of
the discipline is in many ways more a function of recurrent intellectual
dilemmas of a general social scientific nature than they are about the particulars of any specific theoretical controversy. Secondly, and most relevant
to a predominantly British audience, we shall attempt to step outside the
hermeneutic circle, so to speak, and suggest which aspects of contemporary
American political science are most relevant to British political scientists,
and which aspects should have a large caveat emptor sign hung over them.
As the title of this piece suggestsbe careful what you wish for.
The origins of American political science: behaviouralism
American political science has been constituted by three approaches since
its inception: behaviouralism, functionalism and economism. Behaviouralism emerged out of what is ironically now referred to as the old institutionalism of the 1920s and 1930s. Behaviouralism developed as a response to
two interrelated problems. First, the old institutionalism, with its focus
on the formal institutions of a society, had quite spectacularly failed to
anticipate the collapse of interwar German democracy and the emergence
of fascism. Secondly, the United States emerged from the Second World
War as an activist superpower. While we do not wish to reduce political
science to simply ideological justifications of a newly hegemonic state, it is
worth noting how early behavioural scholars themselves characterised
what they were doing.
As early as 1945 the Social Science Research Council argued that the
goal of political science should be: the study of political behaviour of
individuals with the object of formulating and testing hypotheses, concerning uniformities of behaviour in different institutional settings.3 Thus,
early post-war American political science took as its goal the observation
and measurement of actual political behaviour by discrete individuals and
groups with the objective of generalising from this basis in order to create
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a policy-relevant branch of scientific knowledge. In the behavioural revolution, as it was called, we see the basic elements of a distinctively American
political science: a focus on individuals, the refinement of methods and
a preference for deductive theory. This behavioural moodto use Dahls
phrasedominated the study of American politics in its formative stages
(Dahl 1961). However, within comparative politics, a different set of problematics compelled a different set of theoretical approaches to the fore.
The origins of American comparative politics:
functionalism, economism, modernisation
Whilst behaviouralism dominated the study of the American political
system, especially studies of voting and legislative politics, in comparative
politics, the study of what Gabriel Almond once referred to as the uncouth
and exotic systems outside of Western Europe, took functional analysis as
its modus operandi (Almond and Coleman 1960, 10). Whilst behaviouralism mimicked natural scientists, comparativists followed the sociologists,
and here the shadow of Talcott Parsons looms large.
Parsons The Social System became the basic theoretical framework of
comparative politics (Parsons 1951). Parsons theory combined a developmental telos with functionalist explanatory categories. Behaviouralists,
such as Easton and Almond, interested in comparison and development,
took Parsons functional prerequisites, pattern variables and the accompanying telos and sought to explain how social order was possible (Easton
1986). The need to do so was plain enough, as the realities of the cold war
and the fear of communism ran very deep in both the American academy
and state. As Karl Lowenstein wrote in the American Political Science
Review in 1944, comparative politics would have to become a conscious
instrument of social engineering [in order to] impart our experience
to other nations and [to] integrate scientifically their institutions into
a universal pattern of government.4 Consequently, comparative politics as
a distinct sub-field began to take shape as both an analytic and prescriptive
set of theories.
By the end of the 1950s, functionalist theory began to dominate the
study of the exotic and uncouth. The basic hypotheses of this school were
simple enough and were principally extensions of Parsons framework.
Just as Parsons explained societal stability as due to ever greater functional
differentiation, comparativists explained the lack of economic and political
development (another form of stasis) in the exotic and uncouth as due to
the lack of sufficiently differentiated institutions where the more specialised
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and differentiated a set of institutions were, the more developed the state
was seen to be. Even in its early form, institutional analysis, albeit of a
particular type, formed the core of the comparativist world-view (e.g.
Almond and Coleman 1960).
The implicit telos in these arguments demanded that the developmental
trajectories of the rest of the world were laid out as the unfolding of a
sequence that the West had already undergone. While this gave the model
a theory of history, the invocation of such a telos created ever greater
problems. Although functionalism gave comparative politics a framework
for analysis, it was essentially a way of categorising and explaining equilibrial
statics. What comparative politics needed was the dynamic element that
such a system lacked in order to explain change. This element was provided
by the third root of American political science: economism.
Economic logics appear in American political science in two forms; as a
helper for existing political science theories and as an outright alternative
to political science theory. The latter form, economic theorising as an
alternative to political science theory as traditionally understood, was
the progenitor of modern rational choice theory.5 However, this schools
moment was not to come for another twenty years. Thus, throughout the
1950s and 1960s, economic explanations were, more often than not,
invoked to help other forms of explanation. Economism enters comparative politics at this juncture in the form of mainstream developmental
economics. This body of scholarship had a tremendous impact on American
political science, as it provided comparative politics with the dynamic
element needed to explain change, on the macro level at least.
Rostows stages of economic growth, the key intervention at this juncture, suggested that all societies necessarily follow a growth curve, which,
if correctly managed, could be shortened, thus allowing developing countries
to catch up with the West (Rostow 1956). Rostows model assumed a
take-off into sustained economic growth where a state builds up enough
capital over a long period and this is then, given certain institutional prerequisites (pace Parsons), followed by a short burst of accelerated growth,
which becomes self-sustaining. It supplied comparative politics with the
macro engine required to explain not just the dispersal of countries as
regards their stages of development but also a mechanism that would
specify which institutional changes would be necessary to push countries
further along the path to modernity. His ideas were, as Rostow himself
argued, a Non-Communist Manifesto (Rostow 1967).
The historical context is once again important here. The United States
was engaged in a cold war against an anti-capitalist and anti-liberal rival
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who was actively competing for a newly decolonised or decolonising Third

World. American political scientists fused functionalism and economism to
develop an anti-Marxist theory of historical developmentmodernisation
theory. Subsequently, modernisation theory became the mainstay of American
comparative politics for almost a generation. This much is well known. However, two points are of note concerning modernisation theory which are
not commonly made and are of particular relevance for understanding
where American political science is today.
First, unlike the communist utopia, the realisation of this telos of development lay not in some radiant future but was rather an actually existing
one. The view, which of course was echoed after the fall of the eastern
bloc, was that the liberal capitalist society marked the end of history. Modernisation theory was therefore less a theory of historical development than
a theory of the development of an historical end. It was the explication of
the transition from one static equilibrium, the traditional, to another, the
modern, with the futures of the developing world reflected in the present
of the United States. Secondly, although this synthesis of the economic and
the functional seemed to explain the macro-trajectory of development,
modernisation theory was somewhat less forthcoming on the microdynamics that would push states further along the developmental curve.
Consequently, modernisation theory, as a macrostructural explanation
of stability and change, needed to be supplemented by a theory of individualistic social action.
Social psychology informed nearly all versions of modernisation theory
and yet, depending upon who the object of study was deemed to be, social
psychology yielded two separate theories of collective action. Given American
political sciences prior conviction that individuals were the proper focus
of study, macro-oriented theories such as modernisation theory needed a
theory of collective behaviour to make the theory account for change. The
two theories of collective behaviour that underpinned modernisation theory
attempted to account for collective action at either end of the developmental telos. For the moderns the work of Dahl and other behaviouralists
was deemed appropriate. For these theorists, an integrated, differentiated
and socialised public would rationally (instrumentally, albeit not in a
formally maximising way) organise to represent their interests in the fora
of democratic states, with the result that social outcomes would be the
product of trade-offs and compromise.6
The other model of collective action, a complement rather than competitor, concerned the behaviour of the un-modern at the other end of the
developmental telos. A more or less direct successor to nineteenth-century
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theories of mass behaviour (of Le Bon and Traghle), this understanding of

collective behaviour argued that the unintegrated, undifferentiated and
unsocialised (i.e. the modernising) public could, under certain conditions,
erupt chaotically and irrationally. Here, modernisation theorys focus on
the modernisation of institutions was conjoined with a focus on the modernisation of the personality. Unless institutions and individuals were
modernised pari passu, it was feared that frustration with the project
of modernisation would turn to aggression, with the net result that the
institutions of developing societies could be overrun by, or worse fall prey
to, MarxistLeninist movements.7
The problem with these theories was that the facts of the 1960s, both
domestically and internationally, simply seemed to overwhelm them. The
historical conjuncture of the fall of behaviouralism and modernisation
theory with the civil unrest of the 1960s is pivotal for explaining the state
of American political science today. These theories did not fall for want
of microfoundations, as they were predicated on a methodological individualism, of sorts.8 Rather, these theories failed on grounds of prediction,
and what they seemed to fail to predict was nearly everything.
It is important to remember that at the height of modernisation theorys
academic respectability, the United States was in itself caught in the midst
of a civil rights struggle between a disenfranchised and unintegrated
racial minority and an integrated and modern public, a struggle in which
the unintegrated would face off the integrated in frequent episodes of
violence. However, contrary to the predictions of both of the theories of
collective action that underpinned modernisation theory, it was the integrated white majority that appeared to have surrendered rationality.
Furthermore, the practices of the civil rights movement, the unintegrated,
were marked by strategic, rational action and moral argument.9 Meanwhile,
the integrated and modern were busy turning their frustrations with
modernisation qua integration into aggression. Despite these events being
perhaps historys first televised falsification of a theory, their significance
was more or less purposively ignored by American political science. However, such theoretical hubris could only continue for so long before cracks
began to show.
Concurrently, the new modernising democracies were falling to dictatorships and were thus, contrary to theory, sliding back along the developmental telos. Coups dtat in Latin America and Africa had become
standard fare and development was grinding to a halt in many places.
Even in the old democracies, institutional and developmental divergence,
rather than convergence, seemed to be the norm as Europe and Japan took
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trajectories rather different from that of the United States. Finally, with the
rise of Soviet industrial power (an odd thought from todays vantage point,
but true for the time), the institutional realisation of modernity became
plural. It became possible to imagine more than one version of the modern
and, consequently, the telos that informed the theory of historical development behind practically all American political science became unstable and
collapsed.
Transition: from radicalism to rationalism
The period from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s comprises the transitional
moment. Rational choice, a new Marxism, state-centred approaches, social
movement theory and resource mobilisation, all attempted to seize the
centre of the field. The rise of institutionalist theory in all its variants in
American political science as the current state of the art lies, as ever, in
the failures of the theories that preceded them. The international and domestic upheavals of the 1960s were followed by the economic stagnation
of the 1970s. In response to these challenges, faith in both the grand
theory of modernisation within the discipline and the efficacy of state
action in the real world evaporated and the discipline as a whole split.
One part of comparative politics reacted to the failure of modernisation
by embracing a variety of Marxist and non-Marxist inspired structuralist
and dependency theories in order to explain both the lack of development
of many areas of the world and the collapse of democracy in others (e.g.
Cardoso and Faletto 1979; Dos Santos 1970; Evans 1979). Another
branch of the sub-field, however, went off in a completely different direction. This branch went all the way back to Blacks contentions concerning the unity of political and economic science (Black 1950). This latter
path led to modern rational choice theory and the positive theory of institutions, while the former group re-emerged from its brief flirtation with
dependency theory and Marxism with an American version of state theory
and, latterly, historical institutionalism.
From public choice to rational choice institutions
Contemporary rational choice theory grew out of three bodies of scholarship, which together moved economic approaches to politics from being
mere helpers for political science theories to full-blown alternatives to
political science theory. The first major contribution to this body of scholarship was the public choice literature in economics. Public choice, the
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application of (neo-classical) economic methods to political issues, emerged

in the late 1950s with analyses of the problem of the provision of public
expenditure and public goods. However, its concepts and theories remained of marginal import to political science until the inflationary crises
of the 1970s. Public choice arguments in economics turned this empirical
vice into theoretical virtue.
Public choice theorists argued that democratic governments were particularly prone to generating inflation. Electoral cycles in democratic societies
required governments to provide economic goods, such as transfers and
employment, or risk being voted out of office. Consequently, inflation and
instability were seen as the natural consequence of governments meshing
their electoral cycle to the business cycle for electoral advantage. Moving
on from this first foray into political analysis, the public choice school went
on to examine such things as how politicians maximise votes, thus giving
preference to re-election over aggregate welfare and to how politicians and
bureaucrats can earn rents from their constituents.10 This body of theory
appeared to be able to explain many of the failures of state action that modernisation theory had so obviously got wrong. Consequently, this economics
of politics approach gained strength throughout the late 1970s and early
1980s.
The second important intervention was the work of Mancur Olson on
collective action. Olsons work destroyed what was left of the microfoundations of modernisation theory. Olsons Logic of Collective Action
applied the lessons of public choice to interest group formation and, in so
doing, brought the rational choice model full force into political science.
Pluralism and behaviouralism had dominated the study of interest group
formation. Olsons theory was an attack on that model, as well as on modernisation theorys reliance on psychological theories of mass behaviour,
and showed that rational agents would not organise to pursue collective
goods unless some system of sanctions and incentives made agents organise
(Olson 1965).
Olsons theory constituted a quantum shift in political science theorising. Until this time behaviouralism encouraged political scientists to ask
such questions as why more people did not participate in politics. Olsons
analysis shifted the question to one of why does anyone participate in
politics at all given the manifest benefits of free riding? Similarly, public
choice theory took the question of development and turned it away from
such issues as why is development less common than one would expect,
to issues such as why does development happen as much as it has done
given rent-seeking behaviour? In the age of diminished expectations, to
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paraphrase Krugman, the synthesis of Olson and public choice theory into
modern rational choice theory suited the changed context of the period
nicely.11
Building upon these two developments the third major intervention was
the increasing popularity of game theory in the mid- to late 1980s. Game
theory had a certain amount of success in international relations after the
late 1950s with the works of Luce and Raffia and Schelling on arms races
and strategic bargaining, but it was more or less confined there for a
quarter of a century (Luce and Raffia 1957; Schelling 1966). By the 1980s,
many sought in game theory the dynamic (strategic) elements missing from
the static (parametric) models of earlier rational choice theoretic studies.
Unfortunately, in terms of theory building, these studies led to more or less
negative explanatory works. Their formal analysis demonstrated such
things as the arbitrariness of voting equilibria and the emptiness of the set
of possible equilibrium strategies in multidimensional voting. The limits of
this new theory quickly became very clear. These models could not generate a unique equilibrium, and thus predict an outcome, even in a weak
sense (McKevley 1976; Schofield 1978).
Paradoxically, then, these theorists found themselves stuck with the
same problem that had inspired the earlier generation of behaviourist and
functionalist political scientists: how to get social stability from the egoistic
actions of rational agents, because without stability, prediction fails. The
problem was that their models offered no stable solutions. Just as modernisation theory was caught off-guard by real world instability, this body
of scholarship was caught off-guard by the fact that the world was much
more stable than their theories would predict. Given that the world around
us does not seem to be constantly in flux, a way was needed to reconcile
theory and observation, and it is here that this branch of the discipline
theory made its institutionalist turn.
From state theory to historical institutionalism
The other side of the discipline went off on a rather different trajectory, but
ended up pretty much in the same place. Eschewing the spartan and individualistic formulations of the economics of politics approach, the mainstream of American political science found itself somewhat adrift by the
late 1970s. In Europe, meanwhile, interest in the state, particularly the
capitalist state, began to emerge as a new point of departure for political
science on both the left and the right. While in Europe variants of the economics of politics approach fought to get a hearing, Marxist approaches
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gained new-found respectability within the context of the economic crises

of the 1970s. Thus, OConnors fiscal crisis and Habermas legitimation
crisis became the new diagnosis of the problems facing contemporary
capitalist states (OConnor 1973; Habermas 1975). In the United States,
however, the reception of such theories was, at best, arms length. Given
the political polarisation of the period, the mainstream of the American
discipline was not about to throw in their lot with Marxism. In fact, the
most notable theoretical development of the period, state theory, sought
actively to distinguish itself from European Marxist analyses despite using
the same label.12
For these new state theorists the interest in the state came out of a
rediscovery of some of the classic works on state formation and the role
of the state as an agent with, as Skocpol put it, a logic and interest of its
own.13 The basic claims of this distinctively American version of state
theory were that behaviouralisms focus on interest groups had reduced
the state to a simple and pluralistic arena of competition, whereas the
emergent economics of politics approach had instead reduced the state to
a cash register for special interests. What was missing in such analyses, it
was argued, was how states were reducible to neither class interests nor
sectional demands but were instead agents, which could rise above particularistic interests and promote, if not a general welfare function, then at
least a coherent project.14
The key insight of the school centred on the autonomy of the state to
form independent preferences and the capacity of the state to implement
those preferences against powerful interests. The prerequisites of autonomy
were seen to be historically derived, chief amongst those being positive
sovereignty, military control of a given territory, loyal and skilful officials
and adequate resources. However, capacitythat is, the ability to implement those preferenceswas seen to vary widely across issue areas and
across historical contexts. Although canonised in the 1985 collection
entitled Bringing the State Back In, this approach had evolved over the
previous decade and produced some of the most important theoretical
works of the period (e.g. Skocpol 1979; Katzenstein 1985).
A particular problem with state theory was that, as its research agenda
became more sophisticated, it became increasingly necessary to disaggregate
the theory itself. As research moved from such topics as the examination
of the emergence of the state and the role and function of the state in capitalist society towards more discrete objects, analysts found it increasingly necessary to specify causal variables at lesser levels of analysis. As
Krasner argued, a key issue became whether the state was best thought of
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as a static exogenous variable or as an intervening variable, that is as a

dynamic set of institutions that mediates the same exogenous pressure
in different ways (Krasner 1984). Therefore, paradoxically, just as the
Bringing the State Back In volume was celebrating the successes of the new
statist perspective, the perspective itself began to fragment.
Thus, several leading scholars in this tradition began to disaggregate the
state into its component parts in order to investigate which particular institutions were most consequential in explaining particular outcomes. For
example, Hall argued that the institutional organisation of capital, labour
and the state, particularly the relationship between banking and production institutions, determined the ability of a state to promote a dirigiste
industrial policy (Hall 1986). Katzenstein, in his study of the economic
adjustment strategies of smaller European states, looked not to autonomy
and capacity but to the historical evolution of different institutional
forms of corporatism as his main explanatory device (Katzenstein 1985).
The upshot of all this was that by the end of the 1980s state theory had
become disaggregated as the level of analysis moved from the macro to the
meso in order to give actual explanations of particular cases more specificity. Once this occurred, there was need for a new nomenclature for this
emergent synthesis and in 1992 Steinmo et al. coined the term historical
institutionalism (Steinmo et al. 1992).
The claims of historical institutionalist scholars are best understood in
juxtaposition to the understanding of institutions developed by rationalist
scholars. Recall that rationalists were forced to turn to institutions to
explain stability. However, there was no easy way to do this given the way
that their theory is constructed. Given that rationalists hold agents
preferences to be primitives, the uncaused cause of the theory, institutions
may facilitate trade-offs, etc., but the foundation of the theory has to remain personal economic gain or personal status.15 In sum, for rationalists,
preferences are prior and institutions are designed by individuals to facilitate certain outcomes.
Historicists claim something different, namely that agents preferences
are in fact constituted by institutions. That is, preferences are neither
primitive nor given, subject merely to different constraints (March and
Olsen 1984). This is because historicists, in contrast, take institutions themselves to be the primitives of their theory. For historical institutionalists,
institutions are ontologically prior to the individuals who constitute them.
Therefore, in opposition to the rationalist conception of preferences, the
preferences of those individuals are themselves a reducta of institutions.
Moreover, while individuals may construct institutions, such institutions
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are almost never changed on a calculus whim. Institutions are more often
changed by exogenous shocks such as wars and economic collapses,
rather than by the maximising activities of individuals. In short, for
historical institutionalists, institutions structure individuals rather than the
behaviour of individuals structuring institutions.
Consequently, rationalists and historicists differ in their understanding
of institutional supply. For rationalists, institutions are revisable and such
changes are limited only by the costs of redesign, which stem from three
factors: the resistance of other agents who benefit under the existing scheme,
the ability to overcome the free-rider problem, and the problem of acquiring sufficient information. But if there is enough consensus on redesign,
and given that these problems have been overcome, then the institution
will be redesigned. However, in the real world, institutions do not change
as rapidly as rationalist theories would predict. Therefore, in some works
the concepts of path dependency and sunk costs are deployed to explain
the failure of design, but these concepts lack any specificity, at least any not
captured by the concept of habit, or they admit what is anathema for the
school, the possibility of irrationality.16 For rationalists, then, the mechanism
of historical change is rather simple: egoistic choice. From egoistic choice
one arrives at the transformation of social relations.17
The historicists are less unified in their understanding of institutional
design, and this lack of consensus results from disagreement on both
methodological and substantive grounds. One variant leans towards a
more or less structuralist form of the theory where institutions change as
a result of shifts in environmental constraints. These studies, like much
rationalist scholarship, rely on comparisons of static equilibria and the
mechanism or process of change is more or less ignored.18 In contrast, the
other variant focuses heavily on the side of processes. This branch of historical institutionalism is perhaps best thought of as a special, rather than
a general, theory of history.
Where this branch of scholarship has been particularly important has
been in opening up the black box of the internal motivations and worldviews of agents, although such explanations are still resisted, as any appeal
to socialisation or norm-governed behaviour is seen as a throw-back to the
psychosociology that underlay modernisation theory. However, by the late
1980s it became clear that some behaviour was norm-governed and appeals to norms (and ideology and ideas) became more frequent. Significantly,
the rationalists also got on the ideational bandwagon. The reason for this
ideational turn of both schools of institutionalism is actually deceptively
simple.
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As noted already, a particular problem with the rationalist assault on the

discipline in the 1980s was that their models predicted a world in flux,
replete with cycling, multiple equilibria and the like. The emergent historical
institutionalist school, on the other hand, turned to ideas for a different
reason: their theories predicted too much stability. Given the historicist
assumption that the actions of individuals are governed by their institutional context, it made little sense to appeal to those individuals to change
that institutional context. Add on concepts of increasing returns and path
dependency in both schools and the models became rather static and had
to rely on exogenous bolts from the blue to make the established institutional context unstable and therefore open to change. As such, both institutionalisms moved off in the direction of ideas. For the rationalists, ideas
became focal points in situations of multiple equilibria that could be used
to signal convergence, and thus explain stability, or were more or less failures of information (Goldstein and Keohane 1992). For historicists, ideas
became an endogenous factor that could explain institutional change (Hall
1993). Thus, a paradox emerged by the mid-1990s. Both institutionalisms
converged on ideas (and to a lesser degree on norms), but for the rationalists they were needed to explain stability while for the historicists they
were needed to explain change. This convergence was, however, to prove
consequential for where the discipline is at the moment.
Beyond the new institutionalisms?
The problem with this convergence on an ideational agenda was that
elements of both institutionalisms resisted such a move. There were good
reasons for doing so. The first has to do with the nature of dealing with
ideas themselves. The claims of both rationalists and historicists are fundamentally ontological claims. That is, they are claims about the way the
world is put together which are neither true nor false in any verificationist
sense. Given the individualist ontology of rationalism detailed above, there
can be nothing a priori to the individual that another individual did not
put there. Given this, all social phenomena and outcomes must be at base
intentional and ideologies, culture, norms, etc., can only be seen as either
instrumental products that are reducible to an individuals attempt to maximise his or her respective utilities or as informational failures. Therefore,
in rationalist terms, neither ideas nor institutions can have an independent
existence.
Giving ontological priority to the individual means that rationalist scholarship on institutions, with or without ideas, has a certain ad hoc quality to
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it. If ideas were incorporated, then the only way they could be deployed
were as devices which would allow the post hoc reconstruction of supposed focal points and the like (Garrett and Weingast 1993). Of course,
the problem is that such after the fact equilibria identification does little
to promote the goal of predictive theorising so dear to the rationalist project. If ideas were not incorporated, then the old problem of explaining
stability remained and traditional explanations of this anomaly became
consistently less impressive once it was realised that, if institutions themselves constituted second-order collective action problems, then it made
little sense to appeal to institutions to overcome collective action problems
(Bates 1988).
While some historicists have embraced the ideational turn more
explicitly, others have pointed to limitations both with ideational solutions
and with the entire project of historical institutionalism. For instance, in a
recent dissection of the historical institutionalist approach Katznelson
argues that what this approach lacks is a focus upon the macrodynamics
underlying the more meso-level changes such analyses typically focus upon
(Katznelson 1997). A similar claim has been made by Pontusson who argues
that by privileg[ing] the role of political institutions [historical institutionalists] fail to engage in a sustained analysis of contemporary capitalism
(Pontusson 1995, 119); that is, the macrostructural context within which
institutions themselves are located. Moreover, the historicist ontology
creates another problem in so far as it is fundamentally different from the
rationalist one. As noted above, in the historicist ontology, institutions
are ontologically primitive, not individuals. As such, ideas become prior to
individuals, as do institutions. Given this very different construction of the
world offered by these two institutionalisms, any attempt at a synthesis of
the two approaches, with or without ideas, is, at a deep level, hopelessly
flawed.
In response to these criticisms rationalist scholars in particular have
been eager to move beyond purely institutional solutions and provide that
synthesis of the historical and the rational. A particularly important intervention has been made by Bates et al. with the approach they term Analytic
Narratives (Bates et al. 1998). This approach attempts to move the analysis of institutions away from the imposition of constraints towards a
focus on credible promises which can be analysed as the equilibria
of extensive form games (Bates et al. 1998, 5). The authors claim that this
approach is different from traditional game theory in that it combines
analytic tools that are commonly employed in economics with the
narrative form, which is more commonly employed in history (Bates
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et al. 1998, 10).19 The models offered come in two types. Either specific narratives are translated into calculus, as in the offerings of Rosenthal and
Greif, or discrete historical narratives are examined piecemeal, with off
the shelf pieces of economic theory doing the explanatory work, as in
the contribution of Bates. Yet, by developing a unique set of equations to
redescribe every unique historical event, formalisms power is denuded
as it becomes, at worst, an endless mathematical (and non-cumulative)
redescription of the narratively obvious, or, at best, the equivalent of a statistical check. It remains to be seen how these and other post-institutionalist
approaches will resolve the problems that institutionalist scholarship has
always faced.
Conclusions: careful what you wish for
This article has attempted to bring the following theoretical points to the
fore. First, the turn to institutionalism is nothing new. Institutional analysis
of a type has always been a mainstay of comparative politics in the United
States. What changed was that with the denouement of modernisation
theory a functionalist analysis of institutions was replaced by a rationalist
and a historicist version, both of which had their own functionalist pitfalls.
Secondly, these new institutionalisms have not solved this problem; rather,
they have succumbed to a contemporary version of the same problem in
that both of the new institutionalisms predict worlds that are either too
stable, as in the historicist camp, or too unstable, as in the rationalist camp,
and each invites anomalies. These anomalies have led to two other bodies
of scholarship, those in the ideational school and those in the analytic narrative school. At this time it is far from clear if these alternative research
programmes will either solve the problems of existing institutional theory,
or provide a genuine alternative to it. Given that institutionalism is nothing
new, the latter outcome seems especially unlikely.
Thirdly, the conceptions of temporality with which the new institutionalisms operate are both very similar to, and yet very different from,
modernisation theorys. As noted above, modernisation theory was more
of a theory of an historical end rather than a theory of history. While
historical institutionalism, at least in some variants, attempts to account
for the dynamic and contingent nature of historical change, rationalist
institutionalism, despite its new-found love for history, has a familiar
transhistorical ring to it. Just as modernisation theory posited an end, the
modern, and a telos of catch-up, so rationalism posits a transhistorical
subject and the historical context is reduced to a set of pay-off matrices.
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Rather than the end of history, such a view of temporality denies history
any importance as process.
Fourthly, contemporary rationalist scholarship claims that, given the
importance of the microfoundations critique, it follows that, because their
theory of institutions has microfoundations, then theirs should be taken
more seriously than all other forms of theorising. Such a claim is historically bogus and theoretically vacuous. American political science has been
concerned with microfoundations since its inception. In comparative politics,
modernisation theory rested on two separate theories of microbehaviour.
The fact that these were wrong should not make us embrace the rationalist
alternative too hastily as it is far from clear that the economic case for
microfoundations is any better.
Finally, both new institutionalisms represent, to a greater or lesser extent, an attempt to restore to the discipline what was lost with the collapse
of the modernisation paradigm: a new grand synthesis of the individuals,
the institutional and the macrostructural. While historical institutionalists
are more circumspect concerning such claims, rationalist scholars are not.
In a recent issue of the debate journal of the American political science
establishment, PS: Political Science and Politics, three scholars squared off
in a debate over the relationship between Area studies and the discipline
(Bates 1997). The chief protagonist in this exchange, Robert Bates, representing the rationalist wing of comparative politics, invited the reader not
to choose between the discipline and area studies, but rather to realise
instead that local knowledge can and is being incorporated into general
analytic frameworks (Bates 1997, 166). The framework that Bates sees as
central to uniting the discipline and area studies is a synthesis between
context specific knowledge and formal theory [where] game theoretic
techniques provide a source of tools for investigating such institutions
(Bates 1997, 168). Given this, Bates argues that to the extent that rational
choice theory comes to occupy a central position within the discipline then
the conflict between area studies and the social scientific core of political
science will be misplaced (Bates 1997, 168).
What then should a British political scientist take from this discussion of
American political science? First, the historicity of knowledge is often as
important as its content. One of the main reasons British political science
took off in a different direction from the American discipline was that after
1945 its concerns were more domestic than international. As it withdrew
from hegemonic status, Britain felt less of a need to explain and plan for
the development of the rest of the world. America did feel this need, and
so its political science, tied as it was to the political objectives of the day,
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took a direction that had little to do with the goals of pure research. As
such, we suggest that British political scientists should be very careful what
they borrow from American political science.
Secondly, British political science has always had a different set of
progenitors from American political science. A line running through Marx
to Weber and to Durkheim had fixed on either structure or norms as something supra-individual that explained the complexity and contingency of
behaviour. As such, particularly British concerns such as structure and
agency have a resonance that is missing in the American tradition. Historical
institutionalism, despite all its problems, offers British political science a
way of imposing greater analytic clarity, systematicity and a common framework, that is a clearer conception of what institutions are and what they
do theoretically, without forcing the study of politics into a transhistorical
straitjacket. With such a broad focus on the institutional context, one can
move from immediate empirical questions, such as what New Labour is up
to this week, to more important questions, such as why Blair was possible
in the first place. While the rationalist conception of both institutions and
politics in general is seductive, and indeed in certain situationsfor example
in the analysis of inter-European Union bargainingis undoubtedly useful, we feel that too often this type of theorising has neither lived up to its
promises, nor is it likely to do so.20 In particular, we feel that British political
scientists should ask themselves the following question before embracing
the latest rationalist models: is redescribing an historical moment as a
game an explanation or a rediscription?
Finally, we want to advocate a healthy dose of pessimism with respect
to projects that seek grand unified theories of politics. The desire to
synthesise the micro and the macro is attractive, but there are limitations.
If one begins with the micro, as rationalist institutionalism has done, then
the macrodynamics that propel micro-level changes get short shrift for the
ontological reasons set out above. Similarly, if one begins with the macro,
as modernisation theory did, or the meso as historical institutionalism
presently does, then the micro linkages are unavoidably weak. It is unlikely
that either structuration theory or game theory will provide a happy resolution to this dilemma. Accepting this is, however, no tragedy as the best
social science is done in actual comparative work, rather than in the search
for grand theories, as everything from behaviourism to analytic narrative
has shown. In sum, be careful what you wish for, as it may prove to be
more trouble than it is worth.

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Notes
1. We choose to do this because some excellent reviews already exist. See Hall and Taylor
(1996) and Koelble (1995).
2. In dating its origins from the immediate post-Second World War period we are aware
that a distinctively American social scientific world-view was developing from the late
1800s onwards. However, we do not feel that there is much value-added in going this
far back, comparatively speaking.
3. Social Science Research Council (1945) quoted in Dahl (1961).
4. Lowenstein (1944), quotes from pp. 541 and 547 respectively (quoted in Mitchell 1991,
79).
5. As far back as 1950 Duncan Black suggested that there was an essential unity between
political and economic science under the rubric of microeconomics (Black 1950). The
fact that Black was based at Glasgow University at the time may have had something
to do with his ideas frosty reception.
6. While there were those such as Schattschneider who chastised the pluralists for ignoring
the role of wealth and privilege, the model of social action held for a long time.
7. Some studies notably combined both the macro aspects of institutional modernisation
with the micro aspects of personality modernisation. The exemplar is Huntingdon 1968,
esp. pp. 192.
8. Psychology, for obvious reasons, is inherently methodologically individualist, in its
functionalist sociological, Freudian or folk-cum-utilitarian variants.
9. The point was made by David Plotke, and its insight should not be missed.
10. The classic contributions to this literature include Nordhaus 1975; Lindbeck 1976;
Brittan 1975.
11. For a representative example, see Bates 1981.
12. See the various comments to this effect in Evans, Rueschemeyer and Skocpol 1985.
13. In particular, Weber, and oddly, Hintse are cited as the progenitors of this school. However, just as Keynes sought to distance himself from Marx, we feel that this group of
theorists were heavily indebted to Marxist analysis, but really invoked such figures as
Hintse to cover their tracksso to speak. See Evans et al. 1985.
14. Examples include Evans 1989 and Mann 1984.
15. Peoples behaviour, claimed John Harsanyi, can be largely explained in terms of two
dominant interests: economic gain and personal acceptance (Harsanyi 1969).
16. For a very insightful discussion, see Arrow 1989.
17. North and Thomas 1973. As with the North and Thomas study of the rise of Europe,
why these changes happen when they happen are more or less sidestepped with random
and exogenously driven shift in factor prices doing all the theoretical heavy lifting
behind the scenes.
18. For example, the degree of trade dependence or the introduction of new production
systems. See for a typical example of this approach, Kurser 1993.
19. Readers may be forgiven for thinking that this novel approach has been done before by,
for example, Karl Marx!
20. For an elaboration of this theme, see Johnson 1997 and Green and Shapiro 1993.

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Mark M. Blyth
Department of Political Science
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore
MD 21218
USA
email: mark.blyth@jhu.edu

Political Studies Association 1999.

Robin Varghese
Department of Political Science
Columbia University
New York
NY 10027
USA

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