of HI, and to its practitioners the advantage of studying politics this way is obvious
and noncontroversial.
Nevertheless, the popularity of historical analysis of institutions—their origins,
development, and relationship to policy and behavior—has by no means been
continuous. As historians of knowledge remind us, attention to the development of
institutions hasXuctuated widely across disciplines, and over time. Its popularity
has waxed and waned in response to events in the social/economic/political world
and to the normal intradisciplinary conXicts of ideas and career paths (Ross 1995 ).
This chapter will examine the context in which a new attention to institutional
analysis arose in the social sciences in the 1970 s, the distinctions between historical
institutionalism and its closest competitors (rational choice and quantitative
cross-sectional analysis), and the search for agents of institutional maintenance
and change that is at the core of HI. It will conclude with comments on aspects of
institutional development that have received (I argue) too little attention:
the pathologies that become imbedded in public institutions and constitute
‘‘moral hazards’’ in the performance of public oYcials.
1 The Waning and Waxing of Historical
Institutionalism
.........................................................................................................................................................................................
It is true that some classic works that analyze institutions in historical perspective
have enjoyed a more or less continuous life on political science syllabi. Books by
Max Weber, Maurice Duverger, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Locke, Woodrow
Wilson, Robert McCloskey, and Samuel Beer are prominent examples. Such work
was increasingly sidelined, however, with the rise of behaviorism after the Second
World War, particularly with the emergence of survey research and computer
technology. With the availability of large data-sets on contemporaneous attitudes,
elections, and legislative roll call votes, and with statistical analysis of those data
made enormously easier by computers and statistical software, political scientists
largely abandoned the study of history and institutional structures in the 1960 s.
However, after a hiatus of several decades, the study of institutions in historical
perspective reemerged in political science in the 1970 s, took on new, more analyt-
ical, epistemological characteristics, andXowered in the 1980 s and 1990 s. Why this
reemergence? The simplest explanation is that economic relationships were in
crisis, if that is not too strong a word (‘‘Xux’’ would be far too mild). Largely as
a result of their revealed malfunctions and vulnerabilities, post-Second World War
40 elizabeth sanders