- 1 Were We Right all Along?
My concern has been to identify and describe some of the many distinctive
traditions in the study of political institutions. I have not even remotely exhausted
the variety of such traditions. I have not attempted to pass judgment on their
relative merits. I am wary of treating any one theoretical perspective as the valid
one from which to judge all others, preferring to probe for neglected traditions. If
there is a judgment, it is that we should not overlook them. For many readers, the
formal-legal tradition may seem an anachronism, but if one looks at constitution
making throughout developing countries, Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet
Union, one has to conclude the tradition is alive and well.
When we look beyond Anglo-American institutionalism and cover at least some
of the various traditions in the study of institutions we see there is a common core
of ideas. The distinctive contribution of political science to the study of institutions
lies in its emphasis on:describing the written constitutional documents and their
associated beliefs and practices, drawing on history and philosophy—the founding
constituent disciplines of political science—to explore the historical evolution of
political institutions. Such texts and their allied customs constitute the governmen-
tal traditions that shape the practices of citizen, politician, administrator, and
political scientists alike. Even for Anglo-American institutionalism such analysis
provides the basic building blocks of analysis.
Of course modernist-empiricism adds two more ingredients to the pot: some
permutation of the modernist-empiricist tool kit of hypothesis testing, deductive
methods, atomization, classiWcation, and measurement; and contemporary social
and political theory, under the label ‘‘the new institutionalisms.’’ For proponents of
behavioralism and the new institutionalism alike, the kiss of death for formal-legal
analysis is its atheoretical approach. Behavioralism found the study of political
institutions wanting because of its ‘‘hyperfactualism,’’ or ‘‘reverence for the fact,’’
which meant that political scientists suVered from ‘‘theoretical malnutrition’’
and neglected ‘‘the general framework within which these facts could acquire
meaning’’ (Easton 1971 , 75 , 77 , 79 ). New institutionalism takes it for granted that
the ‘‘old institutionalism’’ was ‘‘atheoretical’’ (see Thelen and Steinmo 1992 , 4 ; and
for a survey of the various criticisms and reply see Rhodes 1995 ).
Viewed from the modernist-empiricist tradition, these criticisms seem like the
death knell. Proponents of the formal-legal approach do not spell out their causal
theory. However, many would dispute the relevance of this criterion. If you are not
persuaded of the merits of present-day social science, then you do not aspire to
causal theory but turn to the historical and philosophical analyses of formal-legal
institutionalism. For example, Greenleaf ( 1983 , 286 ) bluntly argues that although
‘‘the concept of a genuine social science has had its ups and downs, and it still
survives,... we are as far from its achievement as we were when Spencer (or Bacon
for that matter)Wrst put pen to paper.’’ Indeed, he opines, these ‘‘continuous
102 r. a. w. rhodes