must interject here Polanyi’s now-classic observation that the decision to let
markets determine outcomes is itself anormativechoice, and that the apparatus
of the presumably ‘‘free’’ and ‘‘natural’’ market takes a lot of deliberate constructing
and coercive buttressing to survive).
The analysis of the RC fraternity, in Shepsle’s words, is ‘‘founded on abstraction,
simpliWcation, analytical rigor, and an insistence on clean lines of analysis from
basic axioms,’’ whereas most HI analysis is founded on dense, empirical description
and inductive reasoning. A focus on interactive games draws RC to mathematics
and economics, while interest in the construction, maintenance, and outcomes
of institutions draws HI toward history and philosophy. The former proceed
essentially through equations; the latter often count manifestations of behavior
(and in fact have a stronger empirical bent than most RC exercises), but HI
employs much more narrative in setting out its causal chains; and of course, its
causal chains are much longer.
In sum, HI pays more attention to the long-term viability of institutions and
their broad consequences; RC, to the parameters of particular moments in history
that are the setting for individual self-interest maximization. As Paul Pierson
( 2004 ) has emphasized, RC takes preferences for granted, whereas HI is interested
in how ideas, interests, and positionsgeneratepreferences, and how (and why) they
evolve over time. There is no reason why the two approaches should be viewed as
antithetical, however. They may well be complementary. The choice of focus
between practitioners of RC and HI may be a matter of individual temperament
and the assumptions and methodological aYnities that go with it, but the
questions they ask may well be of mutual interest. That is certainly the case for
the present writer.
3 Three Varieties of Historical
Institutionalism: Agents of
Development and Change
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If institutions are humanly designed constraints on subsequent human action, then
those who study them over time will inevitably be drawn to ask:whosedesign? And
when institutions change, or collapse, what are the exogenous social forces
or internal group dynamics that are responsible? These questions about agency-
in-change receive a lot of attention in HI—more attention, it is probably fair to
claim, than in RC or conventional pluralist social science. The notion of path
historical institutionalism 43