Institutional Theory

Institutional theory has been grappling with one major problem: how to explain the dynamics of [Page 1188]change in institutions. Scholars in the three longstanding “new institutionalisms”—(1) rational choice institutionalism (RI), (2) historical institutionalism (HI), and (3) sociological institutionalism (SI)—have increasingly sought to “endogenize” change, that is, explain it “from the inside.” In response to criticisms that their analytic frameworks could account for continuity but not for change, which they explained mainly “from the outside,” as the result of exogenous shocks, these neo-institutionalists have increasingly sought to explain the origins of and shifts in interest-based preferences, historical paths, or cultural frames. Whereas many of these scholars have sought explanations using one or other of the two existing alternative approaches, others have turned instead to ideas and discourse. For some of these neoinstitutionalists, this was but a brief encounter, in particular for RI scholars, since taking ideas and discourse “seriously” undermined many of the very premises of their approaches. Others, however, broke with some of the fundamental premises of their own institutionalist tradition with their turn to ideas and discourse. Because these latter scholars have come to have as much if not more in common with one another than with those in the institutionalist tradition from which they emerged, they have come to be seen as part of a fourth new institutionalism, discursive institutionalism (DI)—sometimes also called the ideational turn or constructivist institutionalism.

The three long-standing neo-institutionalisms, although very different, tend to share one common assumption: Institutions serve primarily as constraints. RI focuses on rational actors who pursue their preferences following a logic of calculation within political institutions, defined as structures of incentives; HI details the development of political institutions, described as regularized patterns and routinized practices subject to a logic of path dependence; and SI concentrates on social agents who act according to a logic of appropriateness within political institutions, defined as socially constituted and culturally framed rules and norms. By contrast, DI focuses on sentient agents who convey substantive ideas through the interactive processes of discourse in given meaning to contexts following (contextualized) logics of communication. Institutions, here, rather than static external rule–following structures, are dynamic structures and constructs of meaning internal to agents who have the ability not only to create (and maintain) institutions but also to communicate critically about them and to change (or maintain) them through collective action. But while institutional context in DI therefore refers first and foremost to the structure, construction, and communication of meaning, it can also be understood in terms of the background information provided by the other three neo-institutionalisms in political science, with which discursive institutionalists may engage and from which they often emerge. This background information is all about the structures, understood in terms of historical institutional rules and regularities, sociological institutionalist cultural rules and frames, and rational choice institutionalist incentives and power asymmetries, that constitute the context within which collective action occurs and that affect the ways in which discursive institutionalist meaning structures are constructed.

Thus, the four institutionalisms share with one another a core focus on the importance of institutions, but they differ in their definitions of institutions, in their objects and logics of explanation, and in the ways in which they deal with change (see Table 1). This entry turns first to the examination of attempts to endogenize change and the move to ideas in RI, next in HI, and then in SI, before exploring the same in DI, in particular through the interactive dimension of discourse. The entry concludes with a consideration of the interrelationships among the four new institutionalisms.

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