Forty Years of "Muddling Through": Some Lessons for the New Institutionalism
✍ Scribed by Fiona Ross
- Publisher
- Swiss Political Science Association
- Year
- 2000
- Tongue
- German
- Weight
- 174 KB
- Volume
- 6
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1420-3529
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Abstract
The relationship between structure and agency in the new institutionalism has attracted considerable attention. Most reviews either make claim to the superiority of one institutionalism on this score or seek to integrate at least two of the three institutionalisms by adjusting the balance between structure and choice. By contrast, this review attends to several additional challenges confronting the bounded rationality new institutionalism – challenges that go beyond infusing this heavily structuralist approach with a source of endogenous dynamism. Importantly, four principal challenges to this institutionalism are a repetition of those that damaged the once‐dominant concept of incrementalism: a surfeit of definitions, a failure to distinguish between mundane and momentous decision‐making, a fusion between analytic processes and outcomes, and the neglect of non‐integrative interactive relationships. Indeed, the bounded rationality institutionalism transfers many of the assumptions, ideas and errors of the incrementalists to the institutional level.