CHAPTER 2 Institutional Theory

Although most political sociologists and political scientists nowadays either consider themselves or are deemed “institutionalists,” key differences remain among major schools of institutionalism (see reviews in Pierson and Skocpol 2002; Amenta 2005). In this chapter, we review sociological institutionalism, historical institutionalism, and political institutionalism. We discuss their similarities and differences, theoretical and methodological insights, research gains, analytical problems, and prospects for the study of politics. To focus our discussion, we mainly consider research regarding the development of public policy, the terrain on which many advances in political sociology and political science have taken place and an occasional battleground for these approaches. The basic similarity in all institutional theoretical claims is that something identified at a higher level is used to explain processes and outcomes at a lower level of analysis (Clemens and Cook 1999; Amenta 2005). Institutionalists tend to avoid both individual-level explanations and explanations situated at the same level of analysis. For these reasons, they are sometimes criticized as “structurally biased,” though this is a feature of institutional arguments that has distinctive explanatory advantages as well as disadvantages. Institutionalists typically have problems in explaining social and political change, notably in institutions themselves, and often resort to claims about exogenous and unpredictable shocks or the actions of various agents. Yet, these three types of institutionalists tend to focus on different sorts of higher-order determinants and differ in how much they matter causally. The sociological institutionalists in the sociology of organizations (Powell and DiMaggio 1991) and those examining the influence of the “world society” (Meyer et al. 1997) focus on cultural and ideational causes. These are posited to exert influence either at the supra-societal or supra-state level for states and their policies, or at the societal level for organizations. Historical institutionalists typically focus on determinants at the macropolitical or macroeconomic level, though they rely on no particular type of institutional theory, and instead expect causation to be multiple and conjunctural and often involving time-order and path dependence (Pierson and Skocpol 2002). Historical institutionalism is an approach to political research that focuses on asking big questions, highlights the importance of institutions in explanations, and rejects functionalist explanations for why institutions emerge. Like sociological