Special national roads of development to democracy were no longer hailed, as in
the period after the First World War. At no time did so many countries launch an
institutional debate as in the ‘‘new democracies.’’ ‘‘Constitutional engineering’’
became the highly misleading basic term of the new branch of ‘‘transitology’’ in
the third wave of democratization (Sartori 1994 ). Grandpa’s institutionalist polit-
ical science was again in vogue. Old-fashioned debates on the preference of semi-
presidentialism vs. parliamentary systems were revitalized. Old institutions such
as the one-party monopoly, the collective presidium of the legislature as an
equivalent to Western presidents, planning oYces, the wide range of competences
of a ‘‘prokuratura’’ which was more than a prosecuting attorney, and the gigantic
bureaucracies of state security had to disappear. The new institutions, however,
were the old ones—mostly institutions from Western countries. The most inXuen-
tial institutions proved to be the French semi-presidential system and the
German Constitutional Court. Many details of institutions were copied from a
5 percent threshold for parties during elections to electoral laws, votes of
constructive non-conWdence, and abstract judicial review (von Beyme 1996 , 98 f).
2 The Evolution of Theories of
Institutions
.........................................................................................................................................................................................
- 1 Theories and Methodological Approaches to Institutions
Theories tended to be changing more quickly than the institutions they had
pretended to analyze. Quite frequently theories of institutions lagged behind
the real functioning of a system, such as Montesquieu’s doctrine which ignored
the institutions of parties and adhered to a schematic view of the British system.
Some older theories of politics started from the assumption that political science as
a whole works with an institutional approach, whereas sociology emphasizes the
aspect of stratiWcation (Allardt 1969 , 17 ). This assumption was never correct.
Even older approaches combined ‘‘elite’’—a more important notion in American
social sciences than ‘‘class’’—predominant in European sociology with institu-
tional studies. This concept neglected the necessary diVerentiation between
theory and method. Elites or stratiWcation are basic notions of social theory. The
institutional approach, on the other hand, belongs to the methods of political
science. A theory can be falsiWed. Methods, however, survive even if certain theories
which have been applied with the help of certain methods proved to be wrong. The
institutional approach is not obsolete when the old institutional paradigm of a
746 klaus von beyme