traditions discussed below. I argue there is life in all these old dogs. Moreover,
formal-legal analysis is not dead. Rather I argue it is a deWning starting point in the
study ofpoliticalinstitutions. The distinctive contribution of political science to the
study of institutions is the analysis of the historical evolution of formal-
legal institutions and the ideas embedded in them. The ‘‘new institutionalisms’’
announced the rediscovery by American modernist-empiricist political scientists
of this theme, and they oVer sophisticated variations on it, but it is still the starting
point.
I cannot cover the many traditions of political science worldwide, so I focus on
the two most similar countries—the UK and the USA. If I can show diVerent
traditions in the Anglo-Saxon world, then my argument will travel well beyond it.
To show that potential, I provide brief examples of the study of political institu-
tions in Australia, France, and the Muslim world. I oVer a narrative that is just one
among several of possible narratives. I set my narrative of traditions side-by-side
with the narratives elsewhere in Part II. The aim is to decenter the dominant
Anglo-American tradition found in many ‘‘state of the art’’ assessments.
2 Traditions in the Study of Political
Institutions
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A tradition is a set of understandings someone receives during socialization. A
certain relationship should exist between beliefs and practices if they are to make
up a tradition. First, the relevant beliefs and practices should have passed
from generation to generation. Second, traditions should embody appropriate
conceptual links. The beliefs and practices that one generation passes on to another
should display minimal consistency.
This stress on the constructed nature of traditions should make us wary of
essentialists who equate traditions with Wxed essences to which they credit
variations. For example, Greenleaf ( 1983 , 15 – 20 ), following Dicey ( 1914 , 62 – 9 ),
describes the British political tradition as the dialectic between libertarianism and
collectivism. But Greenleaf ’s categories of individualism and collectivism are too
ahistorical. Although they come into being in the nineteenth century, after that they
remain static. They act asWxed ideal types into which individual thinkers and texts
are then forced. At the heart of the notion of tradition used in this chapter is the idea
of agents using their reason to modify their contingent heritage (see Bevir and
Rhodes 2003 , 2006 ). So, tradition is a starting point for a historical story. This idea of
tradition diVers also from that of political scientists who associate the term with
old institutionalisms 91