neoinstitutionalism

neoinstitutionalism, methodological approach in the study of political science, economics, organizational behaviour, and sociology in the United States that explores how institutional structures, rules, norms, and cultures constrain the choices and actions of individuals when they are part of a political institution. Such methodology became prominent in the1980s among scholars of U.S. politics. That so-called new institutionalism combined the interests of traditionalist scholars, who focused on studying formal institutional rules and structures, with behavioralist scholars, who examined the actions of individual political actors.

History

From the 1930s through the 1950s, traditionalist scholars dominated political science as a discipline, especially in the United States. Those scholars were most interested in examining the formal structures and rules that were the foundation of political and governmental institutions such as the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. Traditionalist studies were often descriptive in nature, used mostly qualitative methods, and usually did not use broad theories to ground their observations in a larger theoretical perspective. Often, traditionalist scholars were quite normative in their desire to describe how political institutions ought to function, as opposed to the empirical study of how things actually worked in practice.

Beginning in the 1960s, political scientists began to move away from focusing on political institutions and instead almost exclusively studied the actions of individual political actors. That so-called behavioral or behavioralist revolution strove to make the study of politics more scientific, and quantitative methods came to predominate in political science. Behavioralists would, for example, focus on specific decisions of individual judges or choices made by individual members of Congress rather than on the rules and structures of the courts and the role of Congress in the broader system of government. The hope was that political scientists would develop broad theoretical approaches that would be validated by quantitative empirical methods, thus moving political science away from the disciplines of history, law, and philosophy and instead bringing it closer to the scientific approaches of economics, sociology, and psychology.

By the mid-1980s many political scientists had begun to question whether the discipline should continue to ignore the traditionalist interest in political institutions—but without abandoning what behavioralists had learned in examining the choices of individuals. They also worried that behavioralism could bring the field only so far and that perhaps nothing more could be learned from that approach. Therefore, a “postbehavioralist” movement, neoinstitutionalism, arose, designed in part to bring the study of institutions back into the discipline.

The new institutionalist approach has its roots in the early to mid-1980s. Often considered two of the leading founders of the new institutionalism, American political scientist James G. March and Norwegian political scientist Johan P. Olsen published a very influential piece, “The New Institutionalism: Organizational Factors in Political Life” (1984), followed by a book, Rediscovering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics (1989). They continued to argue for further institutional analysis in Democratic Governance (1995). In each piece, March and Olsen argued that political scientists needed to rediscover institutional analysis in order to better understand the behaviour of individual political actors within political institutions. In other words, according to those authors, studying individual political behaviour without examining institutional constraints on that behaviour was giving scholars a skewed understanding of political reality.

Streams of neoinstitutionalism

One of the reasons that there is no single agreed-on definition of a political institution is that the neoinstitutionalist approach encompasses a wide variety of complementary, but clearly different, methodologies. There are at least three branches of neoinstitutionalism: rational choice institutionalism, sociological institutionalism, and historical institutionalism.

Rational choice institutionalism

Rational choice institutionalism, which has its roots in economics and organizational theory, examines institutions as systems of rules and incentives. Rules are contested so that one group of political actors can gain leverage over another. Political decision making is explained through modeling assumptions and game theory, as challengers and holders of political power pit themselves against one another. Thus, rational choice scholars often focus on a single institution in a specific time frame, although some look at institutions across time.

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