dependence that is central to HI is compatible with diverse scholarly orientations
toward agency in pathestablishment, as well as in pressures for institutionalchange.
Thus the identiWcation of agents provides one way to organize a brief discussion of
the contributions of HI.
The choice of where one goes to look for prime movers in the genesis and
development of institutions may again be conditioned by scholarly temperament,
as well as philosophical and methodological inclinations. Some analysts have
started at the top, attributing agency in the establishment and development of
institutions to presidents, judges, high-level bureaucrats, and the intellectuals and
business aristocracy who advise and inform them. Others have gone to the bottom,
seeing the broader public, particularly social movements and groups motivated by
ideas, values, and grievances, as the instigators of institutional construction,
change, and destruction.
Inevitably, other scholars have come forward to argue that neither a focus on the
top, nor on the bottom can, by itself, tell the whole story of institutional estab-
lishment, development, and change; and so one must adopt an interactive
approach that analyzes the ideas, interests, and behavior of actors in both state
and society. Comparativists, in particular, prefer a multifocal (multivariate) search
for the actors and conditions that produce diVerences in national outcomes, but
even HI scholars who work on single country settings seem increasingly drawn to
interactive approaches.
The choice of focus has methodological implications, because at the top there are
few actors and one is likely to proceed by analyzing documents, decisions, speeches,
memoirs, and press reports of actions/events. In the study of social movements,
voters, and the legislators who are usually the ‘‘Wrst responders’’ to their demands,
the ‘‘n’’ is larger, and quantitative analysis more plausible. But a high word-
to-number ratio usually characterizes HI work in all categories, and distinguishes
it from both RC institutionalism and conventional, cross-sectional, quantitative,
hypothesis-testing political science. Compare, for example, the work of Eric
Schickler ( 2001 ) and Sarah Binder ( 1997 )—both historical institutional works
that analyze changes over time in congressional rules—to the conventionalAmeri-
can Political Science Reviewquantitative and RC studies of congressional politics.
All this diversity—of agency, methodology, and single-country vs. comparative
analysis—might be seen as a weakness in HI. It is, undeniably, a messily eclectic
genre, and the lack of agreement on foci and approaches does distinguish HI from
RC and conventional, cross-sectional political science. The ‘‘undisciplined’’ nature
of HI in its late adolescence was no doubt what prompted the two founders of
APD’sXagship journal (Studies in American Political Development) to write their
2004 book,The Search for American Political Development(Orren and Skowronek).
However, worries about lack of common deWnitions, methods, and parameters
have not produced, as yet, much sentiment to impose order via more restrictive
criteria for scholars in the American HI fold.
44 elizabeth sanders