in which they will have to be realized. As this suggests, for constructivists, politics
is rather less about the blind pursuit of transparent material interest and rather
more about both the fashioning, identiWcation, and rendering actionable of such
conceptions, and the balancing of (presumed) instrumentality and rather more
aVective motivations (see also Wendt 1999 , 113 – 35 ). 9 Consequently, actors are not
analytically substitutable (as in rational choice or normative/sociological institu-
tionalism), just as their preference sets or logics of conduct cannot be derived
from the (institutional) setting in which they are located. Interests are social
constructions and cannot serve as proxies for material factors; as a consequence
they are far more diYcult to operationalize empirically than is conventionally
assumed (at least, in a non-tautological way: see also Abdelal, Blyth, and Parsons
2005 ; Blyth 2003 ).
In common with rationalist variants of institutionalism, the context is viewed in
largely institutional terms. Yet institutions are understood less as functional means
of reducing uncertainty, so much as structures whose functionality or dysfunction-
ality is an open—empirical and historical—question. Indeed, constructivist insti-
tutionalists place considerable emphasis on the potentially ineVective and
ineYcient nature of social institutions; on institutions as the subject and focus of
political struggle; and on the contingent nature of such struggles whose
outcomes can in no sense be derived from the extant institutional context itself
(see, especially, Blyth 2002 ).
These are the basic analytical ingredients of constructivist institutionalism’s
approach to institutional innovation, evolution, and transformation. Within this
perspective, change is seen to reside in the relationship between actors and the
context in which theyWnd themselves, between institutional ‘‘architects,’’ institu-
tionalized subjects, and institutional environments. More speciWcally, institutional
change is understood in terms of the interaction between strategic conduct and the
strategic context within which it is conceived, and in thelaterunfolding of its
consequences, both intended and unintended. As in historical institutionalism,
such a formulation ispath dependent: the order in which things happen aVects how
they happen; the trajectory of change up to a certain point itself constrains the
trajectory after that point; and the strategic choices made at a particular moment
9 The aYnities between constructivism in international relations theory and constructivist insti-
tutionalism are, perhaps on this point especially, considerable. And, on the face of it, there is nothing
terribly remarkable about that. Yet however tempting it might be to attribute the latter’s view of
preference/interest formation to the former, this would be mistaken. For while the still recent labeling
of constructivist institutionalism as a distinctive position in its own right has clearly been inXuenced
by the prominence of constructivism within international relations theory (Abdelal et al. 2005 ), the
causal and constitutive role accorded to ideas by such institutionalists predates the rise of construct-
ivism in international relations (see, for instance, Blyth 1997 ; Hall 1993 ;Hay 1996 ). As such, con-
structivism in international relations and constructivist institutionalism are perhaps best seen as
parallel if initially distinct developments.
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