The Doleful Dance of Politics and Policy: Can Historical Institutionalism Make a Difference?
State and Party in America's New Deal by Kenneth Finegold; Theda Skocpol; The Poverty of
Welfare Reform by Joel F. Handler; Improving Poor People: The Welfare State, the
"Underclass," and Urban Schools as History by Michael B. Katz; The Politics of Welfare
Reform by Donald F. Norris; Lyke Thompson; Words of Welfare: The Poverty of Social
Science and the Social Science of Poverty by Sanford F. Schram; Francis Fox Piven; So ...
Review by: Ira Katznelson
The American Political Science Review, Vol. 92, No. 1 (Mar., 1998), pp. 191-197
Published by: American Political Science Association
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American Political Science Review
Vol. 92, No. 1 March 1998
TheDolefulDanceof PoliticsandPolicy:CanHistorical
Institutionalism
Makea Difference?
IRA KATZNELSON
Columbia University
State and Party in America's New Deal. By Kenneth
Finegold and Theda Skocpol. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1995. 342p. $54.00 cloth, $19.95
paper.
The Poverty of Welfare Reform. By Joel F. Handler.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. 177p.
$25 cloth, $15.95 paper.
Improving Poor People: The Welfare State, the "Underclass," and Urban Schools as History. By Michael B. Katz. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1995. 179p. $22.50.
The Politics of Welfare Reform. Edited by Donald F.
Norris and Lyke Thompson. Thousand Oaks, CA:
Sage, 1995. 255p. $45.00.
Words of Welfare: The Poverty of Social Science and
the Social Science of Poverty. By Sanford F. Schram.
Foreword by Francis Fox Piven. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. 242p. $55.00.
Social Policy in the United States: Future Possibilities
in Historical Perspective. By Theda Skocpol. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. 326p.
$29.95.
RP ublished in the waning days of Aid to Families
with Dependent Children (AFDC), these books
on social policy, poverty, and the welfare state
provide reminders that policy studies and political
science have been awkward dance partners for the past
half-century. As a coarse rule, policy analysts, especially in schools of public policy and public administration, produce analytically guided case descriptions
rather than the tools themselves. Their orientation to
theory and history tends either to be starkly instrumental or purely normative. By contrast, political scientists
who write about policy are disposed to muster their
cases to illustrate or test deductive theory, furnish units
for quantitative or qualitative multivariate manipulation, or validate propositions about structure, process,
and behavior rather than participate in policy debates.
If policy analysts aspire to influence in current affairs,
political scientists primarily want to advance the discipline.1 Inevitably, there is a lot of stepping on toes.
My purpose in this essay is to ask whether and how
1 A careful reader will discern that in the first parts of the text I refer
to "policy analyses" and "policy studies" but not to "policy sciences,"
a term I reserve for the essay's conclusion. I make this distinction for
two reasons. First, I want to underscore the advantageous characteristics of the insufficiently attended approach to public policy advocated by Harold Lasswell, who used the designation "policy sciences." Second, my sharp criticisms of the qualities of much work in the
policy field are not targeted here on the more Lasswellian tendency,
which has adopted the policy sciences label in its journal and in the
name of its professional association. That said, I also want to distance
myself from the arcane world of Lasswell scholarship, which debates
exactly what he meant and intended in his often opaque writing,
much of which, alas, remains out of print and difficult to find. Still
useful for an overview of the policy literature is Nagel 1984.
historical institutionalism may better choreograph interaction by students of American politics and policy to
the advantage of both. There are good reasons to think
it can. In recent years, a growing number of political
scientists who self-identify as historical institutionalists
have transformed scholarship on social policy by privileging the formative capacity of specific institutional
legacies and arrangements (Dunlavy 1993; Hattam
1993; Immergut 1992, 1996; Koelble 1995; Pierson
1994; Steinmo 1993; Steinmo, Thelen, and Longstreth
1992; Weir 1992). While advancing their subfields of
comparative and American politics, they also have
sought to influence studies of public policy, aiming, as
Finegold and Skocpol put it, to "grasp the true choices
and the actual possibilities that face ... makers of
public policies for the future" (p. 242).
It makes sense, therefore, to think about the achievements and promise of historical institutionalism in the
context of considerations of welfare and social policy,
one of this school's favored set of subjects, juxtaposed
to more conventional ways of working and to other
critiques of policy studies. The books under review
cluster in three categories. Norris and Thompson's
collection of essays on welfare reform in six states and
Handler's critical explication of the terms of the recent
welfare debate directly address the last years of AFDC.
Schram and Katz generate vigorous challenges to the
customary ways scholars study welfare and poverty. In
partnership with Finegold and on her own, Skocpol
mounts the case for an alternative grounded in history
and focused on institutions.
The first set, read with and against the intentions of
its authors, and the second, scanned for antidotes to
complacency, disclose unsatisfactory features of domestic policy studies; not least their flat use of history
and uncoordinated orchestration with the concerns,
methods, and analytical torque of political science. The
third makes a resourceful, exigent case for historical
institutionalism with which I am in keen sympathy and
much agreement. Notwithstanding, I dispute the encircled qualities of Skocpol's and Finegold's research
program, arguing its enclosure cobbles its persuasiveness as an advertisement for the approach they advocate.
AFDC AS TRACER
Though the scale of AFDC as part of the federal
enterprise at the time of its demise was small (spending, on a matching basis, approximately $17 billion of
federal funds in 1995), its repeal, capping a period of
innovation at the state level inaugurated by the call for
experimentation in the Family Assistance Act of 1988,
condensed important trends crying out for analysis: the
transformation of American federalism; a practical and
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Can Historical Institutionalism Make a Difference?
symbolic assault on the once secure New Deal welfare
state and its Great Society elaboration; changes to the
contours of race relations and the social geography of
poverty; shifts in the center of gravity of ideological
debate about the respective roles of governments,
markets, and communities; and a host of normative
and instrumental issues at the heart of liberal theory
concerning representation, citizenship, and diversity.
Set beside these challenging subjects, Norris and
Thompson's accumulation of case materials and Handler's screed against current policy trends provide
disappointing reminders that the great bulk of extant
work on public policy combines semitheoretical description with policy advocacy weakened by the absence of analytical bite.
The Politics of Welfare Reform, seeking "to understand the specific processes by which the current wave
of welfare reform has grown" (p. 3) usefully can be
read as emblematic of the strengths and weaknesses of
the vast majority of only loosely theoretical policy
studies. Chock full of germane information about how
various states responded to the 1988 invitation to apply
for waivers from federal rules, the book collects papers
treating a cross-section of welfare policy history over
the course of a single two- to three-year wave of reform
in one western (California), three Midwestern (Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio), and two eastern (New
Jersey and Maryland) states. As cases situated inside a
slack application of Eastonian systems analysis, these
stories tell sad tales about insufficient organizational
capacity at the state level, the absence of prospective
analysis and poor planning by policy elites, and the
short-term political horizons of politicians whose
courtship of opinion failed to challenge wrong-headed
features of conventional wisdom about race and poverty. Perhaps the most coherent finding is that devolutionist welfare reform has been concerned rather more
with ideology and political jockeying than with addressing poverty.
What to do? Norris and Thompson direct their
advice to policymakers, offering only a series of anodyne pleas: "Turn down the volume of ideological
debate"; "employ elements of a more rational process"; "suspend ideology, moralism, and political agendas"; and propose "reforms which should address real
problems" (pp. 236-7). Having rehearsed, with their
collaborators, how just these hopes have been contravened, they offer no structural or agency-centered
analyses of causes or mechanisms. They strike a legitimizing tone which opposes science to normative purpose. Overall, there is little theory, only a weak specification for the selection of cases, very limited
comparison, and imprecise conclusions. The "principal
lessons" of the concluding chapter are models of
equivocation: "The politics of welfare reform in the
states were remarkably similar and remarkably different....
Different actors and institutions with different
relevant strengths played roles in the politics of welfare
reform" (p. 229).
This kind of slack though well-intentioned brief for
rational policy intervention is one of the main targets
of Schram's robust critique of the limited scope and
March 1998
top-down empiricism characteristic of much policy
analysis. His Wordsof Welfare,a collection of vigorous
essays written over the course of a decade, scores many
points. He discerningly excoriates the credulous qualities of neutered research once inserted into fields of
stratification and power. He demands that students of
policy come to grips with their pivotal role in the policy
process. He insists they invert or at least extend their
conventional research to focus attention on the effect
of policy as seen from the bottom reaches of society.
Schram goes farther. He claims that policy research
based on premises of rationality and systematic social
science necessarily contributes to the perpetuation of
suffering by reproducing the "economistic-therapeuticmanagerial discourse" (p. 4) on which current policies
depend. As an alternative, he combines modernist
studies of ideology with more thoroughgoing antiscience postmodernist theories of signification to promote a different discourse as the basis for a self-critical
social science of poverty capable of assisting, if not
guiding, social change.
This project is characterized by three main flaws.
First, it commits the sin of overaggregation. "Rationality" becomes such a broad covering term that it encompasses virtually every type of policy analysis. Any
differences that exist, say, between Charles Murray,
who has advocated the complete elimination of federal
income supports, and William Julius Wilson, who
advances a social democratic program geared to problems of ghetto disemployment (Murry 1984, Wilson
1996), disappear in Schram's discussion, which places
both scholars inside an undifferentiated diatribe
against "neutered analysis for a managerial state" (p.
9). Second, despite postmodernism's usual disdain for
polarities, the book advances a simple distinction between the role of "critic" and "scientist," as if a
normatively engaged critical social science other than
the discursive one proposed by Schram necessarily is an
oxymoron. Third, Schram fails to examine reflexively
the limits of his own preferred way of working or to
explain how a focus on signification, buttressed, as in
the substantive essays in the text, by an episodic
engagement with data, effectively can advance either
the goals of systematic understanding or social change.
By contrast, Handler's refreshingly direct intervention in debates about AFDC possesses the merit of
clearly harnessing argumentation to purpose. Unlike
Norris and Thompson, Handler understands that ideology, moralism, and politics cannot be wished away in
the name of an abstract and agentless rationality.
Unlike Schram, he does not weigh down his intervention with the baggage of a semisystematic postmodernism. Recent welfare reform proposals, he argues,
blame and bruise the poor. However pitiful AFDC has
been, its demise is even more deleterious. The arguments favoring abolition do not hold up; worse, they
are partial and pernicious.
As an urgent policy brief shifting debate from the
behavioral flaws of the poor to the labor-market causes
of their poverty, this is more than a creditable performance. Its virtues, however, go hand in hand with
defects it shares with other work of this kind, irrespec-
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tive of ideological proclivity; for Handler puts on
display a genre regularly found in policy writing of all
persuasions, the policy prospectus that marshals only
the evidence it likes. Handler is right to underscore
how much public and elite misinformation there is to
correct. Welfare mothers are not all African-American
or very young; most do not linger as recipients; public
provision has been meager; insecure job markets are an
important part of the story. Yet, the divide he elaborates entirely separating poverty from personal mores
is not convincing. He downplays the fraction of longterm recipients of AFDC or the disproportion of
African-Americans who have stayed on the rolls more
than seven years. Full of such elisions, the text unnecessarily relinquishes some of its credibility.
Welcome nonetheless as an antidote to conventional
wisdom, Handler's advocacy is unsatisfactory as policy
analysis. History, ranging from England's Statute of
Laborers of 1349 to President Clinton's welfare proposals, is gleaned to attest that, inside the triad of
capitalism, wage labor, and poverty, welfare policy has
focused for more than five centuries on individual
rather than systemic flaws. The past is reduced by this
generality. Handler's history contains no variation or
institutional particularity. It lacks a repertoire of
choice. Analytically, it seems to contradict the purpose
of the book itself. Why rail against the inevitable? The
book's causal story-a simple functionalism in which
symbolic needs are deployed as cause-likewise is
unyielding, because it fails to specify mechanisms,
analyze politics, or indicate points of likely intervention.
Thus, for all their differences, the flat rationalism of
Norris and Thompson, the heretical postmodernism of
Schram, and the semisystematic policy promotion of
Handler share common features: a hortatory tone; a
reductionist, instrumental application of history; and a
lack of attention to the methods and contributions of
social science. If critical policy analysis were to depend
on the moves these scholars make, then it would be a
nonstarter, since they demand decisions between symbolism and substance, politics and policy, and criticism
and science which, if made, would leave inquiry misshapen and practical purpose unsecured.
HISTORY AND INSTITUTIONS AS REMEDY
Motivated by a policy literature on poverty gone
"stale" (p. 18), Michael Katz, a historian who has
written a large body of first-rate work on cities, schooling, poverty, and race, much of it influenced by the
social sciences, tries out a type of writing rarely validated by the academy: a combination of intellectual
self-reflection tethered to autobiography, historical argument, and the analysis of policy. The result is an
elegant and engaging, yet elusive, book. Providing a
rich text for those of us interested in the sociology of
knowledge, Katz probes how his own experiences and
motivations have galvanized and shaped his fertile
scholarship and directs attention to shifts in standards,
language, and expectation that occur when scholars try
to influence policy.
Deliberately abjuring prescription, he resonantly explores links between education and social policy, the
conceptual faces of the term underclass, the ways
central city inequality intensifies more widespread
trends, the role of ideas in policy development, the
contested distinction at the heart of liberal theory
between public and private spheres, and the means by
which historical time and forms of narrative are deployed in policy debates. This plenteous brew, like
Schram's, is incisively critical of most policy studies of
poverty. Katz, however, is far more judicious and fair
minded; as in his appreciation of Wilson's work on the
social and economic isolation of the ghetto, he is rather
more interested in engaging the best policy analyses we
possess than in dismissing them as necessarily implicated in the status quo.
Not surprisingly, Katz takes history very seriously.
He helps us see how regardful attention to the past and
the elongation of the time span of policy research can
puncture myths and enrich contemporary analysis.
History appears in Improving Poor People to make
evident similarities and variations in distinct policy
spheres over time and to observe that some policy
prescriptions thought to be new in fact are not. Paradoxically, it is here, with Katz playing to his strength as
a policy historian, that the book becomes most intellectually reserved. Its powerful challenge to dominant
ideas focusing on improving the poor rather than on
their circumstances (without losing sight of the poor as
complicit in shaping their own lives) and to the deficiencies of historyless policy studies disappointingly
stops short of generating a historical imagination constitutive of policy analysis.
Katz abjures the chance to make history causal by
declining to explore how sequencing and path dependency might be taken seriously as operative ideas. The
text's narratives are chock full of chances to do just
this, but they are missed. He also draws back from
comparing situations in which continuity has proved
the rule (as in elite and mass representations of the
poor as unworthy), as distinct from those marked by
significant change (the discursive racialization of welfare is a rather recent phenomenon). Likewise, he
shrinks from deploying the conceptual tools elaborated
by political scientists to deal with the role of ideas in
politics and policy, a theme central to his book (Goldstein 1993, Jacobsen 1997, Sikkink 1991, Weir 1992).
Furthermore, the text, especially its brilliant analysis of
decentralized school reform in Chicago, forgoes the
opportunity to heed systematically how institutions
shape human cognition and dispositions to form solidary groups and cooperate by conferring identities,
polarizing, excluding, and assigning properties to categories (Douglas 1986, Wildavsky 1987). In short, Katz's
excellent policy histories are incompletely historical
and insufficiently institutional.
These are infractions certainly not committed by
Kenneth Finegold or Theda Skocpol. By showing and
telling, they strongly advance the case for a historicalinstitutionalist approach to social policy and the welfare state and, more broadly, to American political
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Can Historical Institutionalism Make a Difference?
development. Social Policy in the United States2 compiles Skocpol's essays written from the late 1980s
through the early 1990s at the moment she was bringing her landmark Protecting Soldiers and Mothers
(1992) to publication. Though hardly alone in advancing historical-institutionalism, Skocpol has convoked
this school's most impressive program of policy research for nearly two decades; her substantive achievements and programmatic counsel thus can be read as
archetypal.
Although Skocpol asserts that this course of research
can account for present-day social policy and help set
agendas for future initiatives, the core of her essays lies
less in the present than in characterizing past outcomes, including key traits of the New Deal, social
policy during World War II, and postwar employment
policy. Uneasy with the work of "moralists" and "technocrats" who lack historical and political sensibilities,
she quests to discover "reliable insights into the political constraints and possibilities for making and remaking American public policies at any given historical
juncture, including the present," by focusing on the
interplay among institutions, conflicts, and alliances
over time to investigate the "limits and possibilities in
the politics of U.S. social policy making by taking a long
historical view" (pp. 5-6). A secondary purpose secured via a comparison of policy episodes is the
production of a shaded account of American distinctiveness, persuasively forswearing all-or-nothing notions of exceptionalism based on value continuities,
that can account for variations under such comparable
conditions as mobilization for total war. A key feature
of her analysis is its focus on the significant influence of
history and on how prior policy outcomes and their
cognate institutional arrangements constrain the
present and the future (p. 7).
These resonant strengths can be found in many of
Social Policy's essays, including an excellent paper
written with Gretchen Ritter, "Gender and the Origins
of Modern Social Policies in Britain and the United
States," and my favorite in the volume, an essay
coauthored with John Ikenberry on social provision
during World War II. Ikenberry and Skocpol want to
know why outcomes concerned with planning and
employment policy differed in these two cases; that is,
why war and mobilization strengthened the social
democratic impulse in the British case but limited it in
the American. They proceed within an explanatory
frame they summarize this way:
Warsare not foughtby "the state"in the abstract,but by
particular states with different institutional structures,
prior policies, and contendingpoliticalcoalitions.Preexistinginstitutionalstructuresand politicalcoalitionsinfluence the choicesnationalleadersmake abouthow to plan
for the postwarperiodand how to mobilizethe nationfor
war. The exigenciesof war and the mode of mobilization
reinforcesome politicalforces and undermineothers, in
partby changingthe agendaof problemsdiscussedby the
2
This volume was published in Princeton Studies in American
Politics: Historical, International, and Comparative Perspectives, a
series I coedit with Theda Skocpol and Martin Shefter.
March 1998
nation's politicians and in part by changing the goals and
capacities of politically active groups (p. 190).
Likewise, Finegold and Skocpol's long-awaited comparative historical study of the short-lived and in many
respects unsuccessful National Recovery Administration (NRA) and the durable, instrumentally capable
Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) hunts
within this orientation and displays its value-adding
power. Elaborating on articles they first published in
1982, State and Party in America's New Deal uses a
mainly structural-institutionalist research design focusing on bureaucracy and state capacity linked to a
coalitional analysis of the Democratic Party to parse
the New Deal. (Finegold 1982, Skocpol and Finegold
1982). Finegold and Skocpol show that Roosevelt's
policies varied with respect to institutional design,
governmental capability, and terms of linkage with civil
society. They argue that his policy proposals, though
advanced under common conditions, did not share
conjoint fates. These varied not because of their intrinsic merit but as results of the lineage and arrangement
of the circumstances in which they were propounded.
Set alongside the usual sorts of social policy studies
or even the best work on policy by historians, the gains
they make are pretty clear. History and institutions,
treated configurationally rather than abstractly, are
rendered integral and causal. The analytical space
between thick historical chronicles and timeless models
is filled to good and telling effect. Certainly, Finegold
and Skocpol advance our understanding of the heterogeneity of the early New Deal and the character of
America's welfare state far better than most students of
public policy have been able to grapple with welfare
reform.
LIMITSAND LESSONS
No one who reads Finegold and Skocpol's provocative
and well-executed studies of New Deal industrial and
agricultural policy or examines Skocpol's artfully
honed disquisitions on social policy can fail to admire
their craft, depth of research, or vivid originality. Why
not stop with this warm appreciation and end with a
call for more scholarship of this kind in political science
and policy studies?
I have two main reservations. The first concerns the
conflation in their work of an approach to the design of
research with tools for a research design. Finegold and
Skocpol counsel a reduction in levels of abstraction,
preferring plural words (states, policies, institutions,
coalitions) to singular concepts. They insist on the
funneling role of past decisions and institutional products. They wager on times of upheaval. They venture
the importance of parties and coalitions. I have no
principled reason to oppose these judgments, but they
raise as many questions as they answer. Finegold and
Skocpol's advice would be more compelling if accompanied by an appreciation that the choices they sanction mask others about which they offer no counsel.
Research at any level of abstraction, after all, requires
what Jon Elster (1989) has denominated as nuts and
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bolts for the social sciences, and these can take many
forms. Concreteness, too, is not just a single good
thing. After all, nominalist and notionally "abstract"
issues like collective action problems entailed by nonvoting are just as "concrete" as realist structures like
multiparty or two-party systems.
If, moreover, empirical particularity is to be favored
over conceptual generality (I, too, would make this
choice if forced), then how, if at all, should more
extensive concepts (or concepts linked in models of
various kinds) be used to interrogate specific historical
constellations? Surely, this is not an either/or matter,
for absent such a linkage, case research hazards becoming an ad hoc art, risking makeshift redescription.
If Finegold and Skocpol would rather err, as would I,
on the side of historical specificity and the integrity of
cases, then how should these instances be constructed
to make them potentially deployable as units for comparative study (Katznelson 1997a, 1997b)? The scrutiny
of past policies plausibly (I think manifestly) is important; but how might history be searched? By way of
which mechanisms-branching models, learning theory, or other possibilities? If there is special merit to a
focus on times distinguished by high uncertainty like
the starkest parts of the Great Depression or the
period of total mobilization during World War II, then
what, if any, theory of historical periodization should
underpin this selection? If the substance of individual
and group identities and preferences necessarily varies
by condition and occurrence, then how should their
formation be studied to undergird both the macro- and
microanalyses they recommend? How does the declaration that the past acts as a straightjacket on structures and actors square with the suspension of constraints often associated with times of emergency? Why
is a focus on public administration, state capacity, and
political parties inherently superior to studies of class
mobilization, Congress, or Supreme Court decisions, to
take other familiar (but here criticized) centers of
attention? By overlooking such questions, Finegold
and Skocpol undercut their intention to demonstrate
historical institutionalism's capabilities.
Moreover, if historical institutionalism is to be more
than a category in a scholarly typology but, rather, a
systematic method for work in policy studies and
political science, there simply is no good reason it
should set aside research gear it might deploy to
further its own purposes, provided the use of these
tools is disciplined by rules of use historical institutionalists confidently establish. Instead, and this is my
second reservation, Finegold and Skocpol take an
entirely different tack. Rather than treat the existence
of a theoretical and analytical tableau in the social
sciences as an opportunity to sharpen and deepen the
research capacities of historical institutionalism, they
declare instead it is the superior alternative. Making
social science a contest between clusters of schools
rather than a form of knowledge possessing an ensemble of opportunities to guide analysis, they recurrently
ask the reader to choose their superincumbent candidate, which, they aver, can cope with complexity on its
Vol. 92, No. 1
own, thank you very much, without any help from its
putative friends.
Both Social Policy in the United States and State and
Party in America's New Deal are organized in comparable ways to "test" the capacities of alternate ways of
working. "State Formation and Social Policy in the
United States," the essay Skocpol has chosen to open
her volume of collected essays, explicitly contrasts her
research program to "existing theories"-schools she
labels logic of industrialism, national values, welfare
capitalism, and political class struggle- each of which
"offers insights but falls short of offering fully satisfactory explanations of ... historical phases and policy
patterns" (p. 15; emphasis added). In the book written
with Finegold, the list of competitors to historical
institutionalism shifts from these mainly substantive
categories to the theoretical ones of pluralism, elitism,
Marxism, and rational choice. Both books, especially
the latter, measure historical institutionalism against
these options.
Finegold and Skocpol perform this task in the following manner. Their comparative study of the NRA
and AAA identifies a double-sided dependent variable
concerned with the origins and content of these programs. Both, of course, represented unprecedented
delegations of power to the executive branch to plan,
regulate, and coordinate large chunks of the economy
previously organized by the price system. They differed,
however, in key features of sponsorship and in their
patterns of development. The authors ask (p. 23):
"Why did the national government enact programs
favored by organized industry and rejected by organized agriculture?" "Why did the industrial program
fail" while stimulating class conflict, whereas "the
agricultural program [succeeded] for commercial agriculture" while reinforcing "class domination in agriculture?"3 To account for these diverse results, Finegold
and Skocpol place "states and political parties at the
center of analysis. The main variables employed in our
analysis of the state are autonomy and capacity. The
main variables employed in our analysis of parties are
alignments and strategies" (pp. 23-4). They then measure up this mode of inquiry against its competitors on
the basis of "fit," thus adopting, without public reflection, standard positivist criteria for testing a theory.
While conceding that both the "NRA and the AAA are
consistent with the most general premises of pluralist,
elitist, Marxist, and rational choice theories of politics,"
they set these "big, abstract, and complex" candidates
aside as insufficient because each "is inconsistent with
specific aspects of the origins, implementation, and
consequences" of the two programs (p. 218); but in this
respect as well, they are theoretically reserved, leaving
to the reader to speculate how they might want to
distinguish between the abstract formulations they do
not like and the "nuts and bolts" tools which can be
3 Note that the criteria of success are not in the least normative;
rather, without argument, they seem to be exclusively those of
instrumental rationality. I have raised questions about this approach
to stateness elsewhere (Katznelson and Pietrykowski 1991, Katznelson 1993).
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Can Historical Institutionalism Make a Difference?
found inside such scholarship but which are not consistent from one type to another. What they do argue,
in contrast to literature they do not much like, is that
their work enjoys the advantage of a close accord
between its objects of analysis and the causal narratives
they develop, based on an appreciation for discrete
institutional textures.
Given the interpenetration of their explanandum
and explanans, however, this trial only could have
produced the result it confirms, especially given the
way Finegold and Skocpol characterize their opponents, often coming close to caricature. Consider elitism and pluralism. They announce that these depictions of social pressure and mechanisms of
representation regard the social basis of politics as
fixed. Always? Necessarily? Neither really is a credible
claim. Consider Marxism, which they dismiss as functionalist and social determinist. Certainly, they appreciate that this tradition has been diverse, even historical and institutional, in ways far more nuanced than
they represent and quite compatible in some of its
variants with their own enterprise. Or consider rational
choice, the main target of their ire, which they hold up
for critical examination only when it wears its most
aseptic and disembedded, and least institutionalist,
garb. But, surely, they know just how curious some
rational choice scholars have become about the origins
and constraints of institutions and how committed
many are to careful specification of cases, actors, and
preferences in order to designate how and why people,
understood as interdependent actors, make choices
inside particular historical and institutional settings.
The victory Finegold and Skocpol produce is Pyrrhic.
By flattening other orientations and epistemologies,
they fail to do justice to the power of their own way of
working or show its endowments to best advantage.
Expostulating this way, they demand too high a price
for entry to historical institutionalism's house (implicitly insisting other theories be left behind as irremediably flawed), and they unduly limit the scope of inquiry.
Their "victory" contracts the number of causal variables we might examine, including the social structural
ones both elite theory and Marxism embrace. It privileges some features of liberal representation associated
with the party system as opposed to others (congressional processes favored by many rational choice analysts or interest-group activity singled out by the pluralists) without clarifying whether this is a theoretically
motivated selection (if so, why?) or is limited to the two
time-bound cases on offer. If the latter, then the avowal
that historical institutionalism wins by a knockout is
vastly inflated; but the former never is addressed. It
also leaves the issue of microfoundations so important
to rational choice entirely too open. To be sure,
coalitions inside political parties regularly make an
appearance in these texts, but in an untheorized way.
Of course, there is more than one way to think about
issues of agency; which do they like better, and why?
I prefer both more modesty and greater assertiveness. More modesty because the power of a given
theory,we do well to remember,varies not just from
case to case or from one objectof analysisto another,
but can vary even inside the moments of cases under
investigation. Challenging substantive puzzles always
are complex; no one set of "nuts and bolts" ever can
claim exclusive purchase on them. Indeed, neither of
the key words in historical institutionalism's lexiconhistory or institution-implies a single (unitary or compound) theory or subject matter. "Institution" gains its
power as a concept to probe the infinitely intricate
history of humankind by virtue of its junctional location
at the intersection of structure and agency and of past
and present. If it is one of historical institutionalism's
goals to embrace complexity, then why, a priori, should
it deny itself access to creative confrontations and
substantive syntheses or work without a full kitbag of
tools, including the fine-grained, systematic, and dynamic understanding rational choice offers with respect
to the endogenous generation of institutions?
But I also prefer greater assertiveness. Historical
institutionalism is right to claim a privileged, though
not exclusive, ability to bind structure and agency to
contingency.4 There is nothing wrong with wagering
strongly on a particular approach, provided it remains
open and self-reflective. Resolute and insistent, historical institutionalism should engage other theoretical
and analytic approaches on its terms, assuredly making
selections disciplined by its own purposes as it searches
for criteria of appraisal which stand in the challenging
location between the too-constraining jacket of strict
positivist theory testing and the too-permissive art form
of postmodernism (Laudan 1996). With respect to
microfoundations, for example, it should advance situated understandings of rationality, an approach that
does not so much compete with as incorporate the best
features not only of rational choice (especially its focus
on strategic settings and mutually dependent interaction) but also of bounded rationality (especially its
realist sense of constraints on individuals not only
because of their cognitive limits as decision makers but
also as a consequence of restrictions imposed by structural situations), while insisting on the conditions of
this encounter. Such a course would emphasize that
rationality only can be inferred over time; that particular versions make sense only in specific normative and
institutional settings which are culturally and structurally thick, not just strategically lean; and that it must
link the internal and external environments of persons.
A historically institutionalist approach to rationality
would be agnostic about whether there really are
choices in all "choice" situations and would locate
behavior within the rules and practices that constitute
regimes. It would have to make room for culture and
incorporate identities ordinarily seen as nonrational.
And it would refuse simple oppositions between rational and norm-guided action.
Following such a course, historical institutionalism
might well teach students of policy and political science
to dance more gracefully, beginning, perhaps, by retracing forgotten steps in the genealogy of policy
AI owe this formulation to my colleague Charles Cameron's presentation at a Columbia University workshop on American Political
Development, which we share in directing.
196
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American Political Science Review
studies. I particularly have in mind the epigrammatic
advocacy Harold Lasswell deployed more than four
decades ago when he helped convene a who's who of
American social science, including Kenneth Arrow,
Edward Shils, Paul Lazarsfeld, Robert Merton, and
Clyde Kluckhohn, to review and codify gains by the
policy sciences during and after World War II "in order
to cope with the gigantic crises of our time" (Lerner
and Lasswell 1951, 7).
Lasswell's agenda-setting essay, "The Policy Orientation," opened the collection of papers these scholars
produced. Substantively, he promoted a problem-centered focus. Normatively, he endeavored to advance
the prospects of liberal democracy. Analytically, he
sought to join two levels of analysis: methods focusing
on choice, especially decision theory drawn both from
microeconomics and cognitive psychology, deployed in
tandem with an appreciation of and deep concern for
"the awareness of time" and context ("the key terms
which are used in the policy sciences refer to meanings,
and contexts of meaning are changeable") and for "the
institutional pattern from which we are moving and the
pattern toward which we are going," an interest he
herded under the umbrella he called "developmental
constructs." Policy sciences braiding these elements,
Lasswell argued, could improve "the rationality of the
policy process" and become "relevant to the policy
problems of a given period." He defined these quandaries as issues on the scale of depression, war, and
America's racial divide, problems more fundamental
than mere "topical issues of the moment." (Lerner and
Lasswell 1951, 3-15).
This attractive program has been accomplished only
in part. A good many students of policy, including
political scientists of diverse stripes, have been happy
to use the variants of decision theory to work on
specific problems, but they have tended to neglect
Lasswell's anxious normativity or his particular version
of historical institutionalism and the manner in which
he sought to link these theoretical and macroscopic
concerns to agency-centered microanalysis. The time is
ripe, I believe, not only to secure Lasswell's prospectus
for studies of policy but also to deploy the elements he
advocated to advance a richer, more appealing political
science. The new historical institutionalism must be
central to these advances. Its contribution will dissipate, however, if it seeks a role that is too autonomous
or adverse.
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