attempts... serve only to demonstrate... the inherent futility of the enterprise.’’
He holds a ‘‘determinedly old-fashioned’’ view of the study of politics, with its
focus on history, institutions, and the interaction between ideas and institutions
(Greenleaf 1983 , xi). Moreover, Bogdanor ( 1999 , 149 , 150 , 175 , 176 – 7 , 178 )is
not about to apologize for his version of ‘‘political science.’’ He has a profound
aversion to ‘‘over-arching theory’’ and ‘‘positivism,’’ opting for ‘‘an indigenous
British approach to politics, a deWnite intellectual tradition, and one that is worth
preserving.’’ This is the tradition of Dicey, ‘‘who sought to discover what it was
that distinguished the British constitution from codiWed constitutions;’’ and
Bagehot, ‘‘who... sought to understand political ‘forms’ through the analysis of
political ‘forces’.’’ Similarly, viewed from a constructivist standpoint, the absence
of the conventional battery of social science theories is also not a problem because
its proponents emphasize the meanings of rules for actors seeking the explanation
of their practices in the reasons they give. Null hypotheses and casual modeling
play no part. Formal-legal analysis has its own distinctive rationale and, under-
stood as the analysis ofthe historical evolution of formal-legal institutions and the
ideas embedded in them, it is the deWning characteristic of the political science
contribution to the study of political institutions.
- 2 Where are We Going? History, Ethnography, and the
Study of Political Institutions
A key concern in the formal-legal analysis of institutions, in idealism, in post-
Marxism, and in various species of the new institutionalism is the interplay of ideas
and institutions. In their diVerent ways, all analyze the historical evolution of
formal-legal institutions and the ideas embedded in them. So, we read constitu-
tions as text for the beliefs they embed in institutions. We also explore the related
customs by observing politicians and public servants at work because observation
is the prime way of recovering ideas and their meanings. My argument for the
continuing validity of old institutionalism, therefore, stresses, not the provision of
‘‘facts, facts, facts,’’ but historical and philosophical analysis.
The focus on meanings is the deWning characteristic of interpretive or construct-
ivist approaches to the study of political institutions. So, an interpretive approach
to political institutions challenges us to decenter institutions; that is, to analyze the
ways in which they are produced, reproduced, and changed through the particular
and contingent beliefs, preferences, and actions of individuals. Even when an
institution maintains similar routines while personnel change, it does so mainly
because the successive personnel pass on similar beliefs and preferences.
So, interpretive theory rethinks the nature of institutions as sedimented products
of contingent beliefs and preferences.
old institutionalisms 103