paradigm remains largely unchallenged (at least within the conWnes of the
policy-making arena) and in which change is largely incremental; and (b) periods
of ‘‘exceptional’’ policy-making (and change), often associated with crises, in which
the very parameters that previously circumscribed policy options are cast asunder
and replaced, and in which the realm of the politically possible, feasible, and
desirable is correspondingly reconWgured.
Hall concentrates on developing an abstracted, largely deductive, and
theoretically-informed periodization of the policy process which might be applied
in a variety of contexts. It stresses the signiWcance of ideas (in the form of
policy-making paradigms which are seen to act as cognitiveWlters) and leads to a
periodization of institutional change in terms of the policy-making paradigms
such institutions instantiate and reXect. Yet it remains largely descriptive, having
little to say about the processes of change which underlie the model.
This provides the point of departure for a signiWcant body of more recent, and more
self-consciously constructivist, scholarship (see, especially, Blyth 2002 ;Hay 2001 ).
This still nascent literature asks under what conditions paradigms emerge, consoli-
date, accumulate anomalies, and become subject to challenge and replacement.
Attention has focused in particular upon the moment of crisis itself, a concept much
invoked but rarely conceptualized or further explicated in the existing literature. 10
Blyth’s meticulous work on the US and Swedish cases ( 2002 ) shows well
the additional analytical purchase that constructivism oVers to institutionalists
interested not only in institutional process tracing but in accounting for the
emergence of new policy paradigms and attendant institutional logics in and
through moments of crisis. 11 Indeed, his landmark study demonstrates the causal
and constitutive role of ideas in shaping the developmental trajectories of advanced
capitalist economies. It has rapidly become a, perhapsthe, key referent and point of
departure for the constructivist institutionalist research programme.
The analytical focus of his attentions is the moment of crisis itself, in which one
policy paradigm is replaced by another. Crises, he suggests, can be viewed
as moments in which actors’ perceptions of their own self-interest become
problematized. Consequently, the resolution of a crisis entails the restoration of a
more ‘‘normal’’ condition in which actors’ interests are once again made clear and
transparent to them. As nature abhors a vacuum, so, it seems, political systems abhor
uncertainty. Crises thus unleash short bouts of intense ideational contestation in
which agents struggle to provide compelling and convincing diagnoses of the
pathologies aZicting the old regime/policy paradigm and the reforms appropriate
to the resolution of the crisis. Moreover, and crucially for his analysis, such crisis
theories, arising as they do in moments of uncertainty, play a genuinely constructive
10 It is perhaps again important to note that although constructivist institutionalists come to a
position very similar to that of their fellow constructivists in international relations suggesting, for
instance, that ‘‘crises are what states make of them’’ (cf. Wendt 1992 ), this is an empirical observation
not a logical correlate of a prior ontological commitment.
11 The following paragraphs draw on and further develop the argumentWrst presented in Hay
( 2004 b, 207 – 13 ).
constructivist institutionalism 67