help in understanding the apparent maladaptation of institutions after long
periods of stability, or the challenge to institutions posed by the new social
movements of the 1960 s and 1970 s.
A major outcome of the 1960 s– 70 s challenge to pluralism was the rediscovery of
the importance of state institutions and their partial autonomy from civil society
(that is, the perception that public institutions were much more than ‘‘black boxes’’
processing demands from society by turning them into policies). The attack
on pluralism thus contributed importantly to the newXowering of historical
institutionalism (HI).
As it turned out, rational choice practitioners and historical institutionalists
were largely in agreement on one essential deWnition and premise: that institutions
constitute the ‘‘humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction’’
(North 1990 ). But the two schools diVer greatly in the object and timespan of
their studies. For RC, it is the microcosmicgame, the particular interaction of
preference-holding, utility-seeking individualswithina set of (stable) institutional
constraints (whether those are viewed as exogenous, or permeable and action-
constructed) that is of interest, and RC borrowings are mainly from economics and
mathematics.
For HI, what is mainly of interest is theconstruction,maintenance, andadapta-
tionof institutions. HI scholars are not uninterested in individual preferences and
the logic-driven, stylized way they might play out, but HI is more likely to deWne
human motivation in terms ofgoals—which have a more public, less self-interested
dimension—and in collective action, whether among executive oYcials,
legislators, or social groups. RC (at least as perceived by HI) cares more about
the abstracted game under the microscope, whereas HI is generally more
concerned with the long-term evolution andoutcome(intended or not) of a welter
of interactions among goal-seeking actors, both within institutions, and with their
challengers outside.
This attention to goals, collective action, outcomes, and persistence inevitably
draws HI to ideas, and ideas are diVerent from the preferences or consciousness of
rules with which RC is concerned. Ideas are relational, and often embody norma-
tive a prioris. Whether or not ideas are mere abstractions from, or disguises for,
individual preferences is less interesting to HI than the obvious fact that ideas serve
as mobilizing forces for collective action by social groups that want to create or
change institutions (Lieberman 2002 , for example); and for institutional actors
themselves, ideas serve as the glue that holds an administration, party, or agency
together in its tasks, help to garner public support, and provide a standard to
evaluate the institution’s policy outcomes.
It is a short step from concern with ideas and outcomes to concern with
evaluative/normative questions about the ‘‘goodness’’ of particular institutions,
or struggles to achieve a ‘‘good state.’’ HI scholars have a more normative, reformist
bent than the studiously dispassionate and market-aYrming RC group (one
42 elizabeth sanders