Comparative Institutionalism Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

In comparative politics, like in other subfields of political science, the starting point of the contemporary institutionalist scholarship is the idea of “bringing the state back in,” which became a rallying cry in the 1980s. Reacting to intellectual trends such as Marxism and system theory, this type of scholarship emphasized state autonomy and the structuring role of state institutions (i.e., formal and informal norms and rules) in political life. This push for a more systematic analysis of the state was grounded in the assumption that state actors and institutions do more than simply reflect material interests. In fact, a major institutionalist belief is that institutions mediate the concrete political impact of such interests. That is not to say that institutions are the only influential factor in politics but rather that institutions should become a focal point of comparative political analysis. Interestingly, even when institutionalist scholars work on only one country, they typically need to refer to other polities to identify and stress what is specific about that country’s institutions. Therefore, institutionalist theory naturally leads to comparative perspectives on politics.

Variants: Sociological And Rational Choice Institutionalism

Institutionalism research in comparative politics takes different forms that largely point to the broader distinction between sociological institutionalism, rational choice institutionalism, and historical institutionalism. Because sociological institutionalism is not primarily centered on political institutions, it is not discussed here. As for research in comparative rational choice institutionalism, it has engaged a number of prominent political scientists such as Robert Bates, Barbara Geddes, Margaret Levi, Elinor Ostrom, George Tsebelis, and Barry Weingast. A recent example of comparative rational choice institutionalism in political science is Daniel N. Posner’s (2005) Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa, which shows how political institutions “help to determine which ethnic cleavage becomes politically salient” in multiethnic polities (p. 3). Drawing on the idea put forward by Robert Bates that ethnic groups are rent-seeking coalitions involved in rational calculations, Posner explores “the question of why individuals choose to emphasize the particular ethnic identities they do” (p. 3). From this perspective, the study of ethnic groups is highly relevant for rational choice institutionalists because it allows them to stress the rational aspects of seemingly irrational processes such as nationalism and ethnic conflicts.

Another important contribution to rational choice institutionalism is the work of George Tsebelis on “veto players,” which stresses the impact of the institutional rules of the game on the behavior of (rational) political actors. As suggested below, the concept of veto player has been widely used in comparative political analysis, including analyses by scholars who do not belong to rational choice institutionalism. This remark should not obscure the fact that in comparative politics and beyond, rational choice institutionalists commonly embrace a specific vision of institutions that stems from their focus on individuals and their strategies. As Margaret Levi puts it in her classic Of Rule and Revenue (1988), “The rational choice approach recognizes that institutions and structures are the consequences of human actions. . . . Individuals create institutions—although, of course, institutions, structures, and other macro-states also influence individual preferences and behaviors” (p. 8).

According to Craig Parsons, however, some of the comparative scholarship known as “rational choice institutionalism” puts more causal weight on structural-economic factors than on the weight of political institutions. Important to note, Parsons cautions that in comparative politics as elsewhere, the term institutionalism should be used so that it refers only to perspectives truly focusing on the structuring role of institutions in political life. Stretching the meaning of the term institutionalism to include approaches in which institutions are not a primary form of political causality is potentially misleading; for this reason, Parsons claims that historical institutionalism is the most purely “institutionalist” perspective in comparative politics.

Historical Institutionalism

A key assumption of historical institutionalist perspectives in comparative politics is that institutionally embedded rules of the game strongly affect political behavior as well as policy development. From this perspective, political institutions create obstacles and opportunities for actors, and it has been argued that the number of institutional veto players/points present in a polity will structure the political. In her comparative book on health politics, for instance, Ellen Immergut has shown how national political institutions shape the mobilization of interest groups such as doctors. From this angle, “political institutions shape (but do not determine) political conflict by providing interest groups with varying opportunities to veto policy” (Kay 1999, 406). In consequence, although we cannot assume that institutions alone explain political outcomes, from a comparative and institutionalist standpoint, it is crucial to pay close attention to the structuring role of institutions in explaining political and policy differences between countries. This remark points to the fact that as far as the idea of rules of the game is concerned, historical institutionalism and the work of rational choice scholars such as Tsebelis intersect.

In addition to studying political institutions and the rules of the game they create, many comparative institutionalist scholars have taken a historical perspective on the development of institutional and policy legacies and their effects over time. Here, the objective is to explore how temporal institutional processes create constraints and opportunities that can either facilitate or

impede change. One influential perspective in the historical institutionalist literature concerns the analysis of path dependence (i.e., how past developments typically constrain future change through factors such as increasing returns that make it harder for political actors to alter an existing institutional path). In comparative research, analyzing the historical paths of institutional development is critical to contemporary institutionalist research in comparative politics. A prime example is the work of Paul Pierson on the politics of welfare state reform during the Reagan and the Thatcher years. According to him, the expansion of social programs during the post–World War II era created powerful vested interests that made policy privatization and retrenchment harder to achieve during the 1980s than what conservatives and academic commentators alike had predicted. From this angle, policies and institutions are embedded in historical logics that accumulate over time to constrain or facilitate change at a later date. As Pierson (2004) states in a more recent book, the idea here is not simply that “history matters” but that the timing and sequence of institutional development is a potential causal factor that deserves close attention in comparative political analysis. In this book, Pierson, who is a historical institutionalist, draws extensively on the work of rational choice theorist Douglass North, who is widely known for his research on path dependence.

Recent Trends

In recent years, reacting to the above scholarship on path dependence, historical institutionalist scholars have stressed the need for more comparative research on the sources of path-departing institutional change. Beyond outside shocks and rare critical junctures, scholars such as Kathleen Thelen argue that over time, incremental processes and political strategies can lead to path-departing changes. In her work, Thelen explores the role of forms of incremental yet path-departing change such as conversion (i.e., the transformation of existing institutions without any radical change in their formal boundaries) and layering (i.e., the creation of new institutional layers alongside existing institutions).

A growing number of institutionalist scholars such as John L. Campbell have also argued that to fully explain institutional change, scholars needed to turn to the role of ideas in institutional development. Because ideas help actors assess existing institutional legacies and forge new institutions when existing ones are seen as flawed, it has been argued that they are a key component of institutional politics. Although Craig Parsons reminds us that ideational analysis belongs to a different type of explanation than institutional analysis, he also shows that it is possible to effectively combine these two types of causal argument. It is hard to predict in which direction contemporary institutional analysis is heading as far as comparative politics is concerned but it is likely that the analysis of change will remain on the scholarly agenda for years to come.

Bibliography:

Campbell, John L. Institutional Change and Globalization. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004.
Evans, Peter B., Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds. Bringing the State Back In. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Hall, Peter A., and Rosemary C. R.Taylor. “Political Science and the Three Institutionalisms.” Political Studies 44 (1996): 936–957.
Immergut, Ellen L. Health Politics: Interest and Institutions in Western Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Kay, Stephen J. “Unexpected Privatizations: Politics and Social Security Reform in the Southern Cone.” Comparative Politics, 31, no. 4 (1999): 403–422.
Levi, Margaret. Of Rule and Revenue. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
Parsons, Craig. How to Map Arguments in Political Science. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Pierson, Paul. Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher, and the Politics of Retrenchment. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Politics in Time. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004.
Posner, Daniel N. Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Thelen, Kathleen. How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Tsebelis, George. Veto Players: How Political Institutions Work. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002.

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