FROM HISTORICAL INSTITUTIONALISM TO DISCURSIVE
INSTITUTIONALISM:
EXPLAINING CHANCE IN COMPARATIVE POLITICAL ECONOMY
Vivien A. Schmidt
Seminaroplæg 070109
Gunnar Scott Reinbacher
åbning
• Artiklen, de to artikler
• Hovedspørgsmålet handler om at kunne
forklare forandring, udvikling og dynamik
– EU dynamikker
• Aktualiseringsramme
– Equilibrium (Parssons)
– Evolution
– Dynamisk forandring
– revolution
introduction
historical institutionalism, whic much better
at explaining institutional continuity or
describing institutional evolution rather
than at explaining institutional change.
such approaches still do more to describe
what changes occur than to explain why
change occurs. Det exogene
introduction
Discursive institutionalism is the term I use
for all methodological approaches that
take ideas and discourse seriously, by
focusing on the substantive content of
ideas and/or on the Interactive processes
that serve to generate those ideas and
commumcate them to the public det
endogene
introduction
discursive institutionalism offers insights into why
political economic institutions change (or continue) by
zooming in not only on sentient agents’ cognitive and
normative ideas about what they were doing and why at
different levels of generality—policy, program, and
philosophy—but also on their discursive interactions
regarding who spoke to whom where, when and why in
the process of generating those ideas in a ’coordinative
discourse’ of policy construction and in articulating them
in a ’communicative’ discourse of public deliberation and
legitimization.
introduction
• Paperet ser både en modstilling mellem HI
og DI, men også, at de kan
komplementere hinanden
• Paperet er kritisk over for HI, men i denne
senere artikel også kritisk over for
begrænsningerne i DI
Forandringsforklaring i HI
Historical institutionalism focuses on institutions.
Institutions åre conceptualized as structures external to
political economic actors, constraining them through the
historical paths that shape their actions. Such actors åre
not agents as such, but rather formalized as corporate
actors like unions, business, bureaucracy, politicians,
and so forth. There åre no individuals per se here either,
and where corporate actors åre seen to have
motivations, these åre mostly rational choice-derived
assumptions that they act in certain ways to maximize
their interests, and that such motivations drive their
interactions.
HI
• Problemer med at forklare forandring
– Mere statisk
– Mangler forandringsagenter
– Forandring sker blot
– I relation til ydre og ikke indre processer
– Kan ikke forklare kapitalismens udvikling over
tid
HI
the result is a doubly equilibrium-focused
approach to the varieties of capitalism in which
coordination and complementarity in capitalist
systems admit of little change other than positive
feedbacks effects while the system’s
homeostatic equilibrium ensures that changing
any one component leads to adjustments in the
other components, but no real transformation of
the system as a whole or even evolution except
at moments of punctuated equilibrium.
EXPLAINING CHANCE IN DISCURSiVE
INSTITUTIONALISM
diskursive institutionalisme ser indad på aktører,
udsagn, ideer.
timing of change
policy ideas (forandrer sig hurtigt)
programmatiske ideer (varer længere)
(Kuhn)
philosophical ideas (langsomst i forandring)
(idealtyper, Weber, den protestantiske etik..)
DI
• Policy ideas, we still don`t know how they
change, foreground
• Programmatic, the same problem
• Philosophical ideas, bigger problem,
remain deep in background
DI
• Content of change
– RI ideer adskilt fra interesser
– SI endogene såvel som exogene faktorer
– DI lidt som SI men mere dynamiske omkring
interesser og ideer
• Kognitive ideer, interest based logic
• Normative ideas, basic principles og values
Svarer noget til Weber, formåls og værdirationalitet
DI
• Agents of change
Ideas do not ’float freely’
Carriers of ideas who articulate them
Focusing on the agents of change is importent
Discursive dynamics of change
Discourse encompasses not only the
representation of ideas, or ’what is said’ in
all its levels, types, as well as forms—
including narratives, myths, frames,
collective memories, stories,scripts,
scenarios, images, and more . It also
refers to ’who said what to whom where
and why,’ or the Interactive processes by
which those ideas åre constructed and
communicated.
Discursive dynamics of change
• The interactive dimention
• The coordinative discourse among policy
actors
• communication
• The arrows of discursive interaction,
different directions
• (problemer med guidelines)
Discursive institutionel context
• Text in particular meaning context
– Logic of communication
– Foreground discursive abilities through which
agents may change their institutions, svarer til
Habermas kommunikativ handlen. Gramsci
tages ind her, men han er nu klasseorienteret
Historical institutional context
Historical institutionalism, by contrast to
DI, explains change from the outside, by
taking those courses of action and seeing
how they play out over time. But it can
nevertheless prove complementary to
discursive institutionalist explanation, by
showing how formal institutions shape
discursive interactions.
THE LIMITS OF DlSCURSIVE INSTITUTIONALIST
EXPLANATIONS OF CHANCE
• Intenderer ikke at forklare al forandring indefra
• Forklarer forandring over tid gennem agenternes
produktion af ideer og regler
• Anerkender i en vis forstand det materielle og
interesserne
• Interessebaseret ideer
• Puzzling and powering
• Kompleks relation mellem power, position, ideas
• Bliver problematisk omkring ”causal influence”
DI
– HI
• RI
– DI
SI
conclusion
We åre left with one final question: what is
the value-added of approaches that take
ideas and discourse seriously? Discursive
institutionalism endogenizes change,
explaimng much of how and why public
actors bring about institutional change,
thereby reinjecting agency into historical
institutionalism.
spørgsmål
• De fire instutionalismer og deres indre
sammenhæng
• Betydningen af proces metoder
• Causal influence
• Guidelines for HI og DI upræcis
– Om at bruge DI i praksis
• Kan adaptiv tilgang hjælpe
• Kompleksiteten forurener
• Foucault, Marx, Weber, SI,Gramsci,
spørgsmål
• SI – Philosophically
– Equilibrium/strukturfunktionalisme (Parssons)
– Systemteori/kybernetik (Buckley)
– Ideologiske statsapparater (Althusser, tidlig Foucault,
tidlig Habermas (erkentniss und interesse)
– Aktør/struktur teoretikere, modernitetens sociologer
– Makrosociologi, Marxisme
– Kritisk realisme
– Foucault