Historical Institutionalism - Old and New Institutionalism

Old and New Institutionalism

Institutions have been always central to social science but they have not been addressed with the same emphasis and manner in every approach. Before and after the turn of the twentieth century, several scholars were writing about institutions, but they had not developed a theory of institutions yet. Most of these approaches relied heavily on the study of formal institutions (i.e. the law) (see hermeneutics). Moreover, they were highly normative and, thus, prescriptive (i.e. Weber prescribed the professionalization of bureaucracy in order to have a modern state). Institutionalist e. This is often called "old institutionalism".

During the 1950s, structural-functionalism blurred the study of institutions. They were more concerned about the variability of the modernization process across countries and about prescribing and generalizing at the systemic level rather than acknowledging the different paths that development can take. (i.e. Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture).

The new institutionalism begins with the works of Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies; Barrington Moore's, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, and more specifically Theda Skocpol’s, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia & China. These books spawned the new research program.

As stated above, before HI arrived, institutions were only treated as the formal rules of behavior (i.e. the law). In contrast, historical institutionalism has loosened the definition of institutions. In this new approach, institutions can take the shape of a formal bureaucratic structure but also an ideology or an informal costume. The significance of this change of approach is that historical institutionalism denies that power and history have only one source as past approaches (i.e. the State) and has given agency to all kinds of social groups and behaviors (e.g. in Weapons of the Weak James Scott acknowledges the power of "gossip" in political life.) In emphasizing the participation of all kind of groups, not just elites or the state, historical institutionalism offers a dynamic approach to history.

Moreover, HI avoids prescription. On the contrary, since historical institutionalism is interested in the richness and different paths that a revolution or an economic reform can take given that different groups participate in each case, they are sensitive to the differences that can occur when following a particular political design (i.e. democracy). In that sense, it also avoids the teleological determinism of past approaches. For historical institutionalism, the actors both determined by and are producers of history.