European Political Science Review (2010), 2:1, 1–25 & European Consortium for Political Research
doi:10.1017/S175577390999021X
Taking ideas and discourse seriously:
explaining change through discursive
institutionalism as the fourth ‘new
institutionalism’
V I V I E N A . S C H M I D T *
Jean Monnet Professor of European Integration, Director, Center for International Relations, Department of
International Relations, Boston, MA, USA
All three of the traditionally recognized new institutionalisms – rational choice, historical,
and sociological – have increasingly sought to ‘endogenize’ change, which has often meant a
turn to ideas and discourse. This article shows that the approaches of scholars coming out
of each of these three institutionalist traditions who take ideas and discourse seriously can
best be classified as part of a fourth ‘new institutionalism’ – discursive institutionalism (DI)
– which is concerned with both the substantive content of ideas and the interactive processes
of discourse in institutional context. It argues that this newest of the ‘new institutionalisms’
has the greatest potential for providing insights into the dynamics of institutional change by
explaining the actual preferences, strategies, and normative orientations of actors. The
article identifies the wide range of approaches that fit this analytic framework, illustrating
the ways in which scholars of DI have gone beyond the limits of the traditional institutionalisms
on questions of interests and uncertainty, critical junctures and incremental change,
norms and culture. It defines institutions dynamically – in contrast to the older neoinstitutionalisms’
more static external rule-following structures of incentives, pathdependencies,
and cultural framing – as structures and constructs of meaning internal to
agents whose ‘background ideational abilities’ enable them to create (and maintain)
institutions while their ‘foreground discursive abilities’ enable them to communicate
critically about them, to change (or maintain) them. But the article also points to areas for
improvement in DI, including the theoretical analysis of processes of ideational change, the
use of the older neo-institutionalisms for background information, and the incorporation of
the power of interests and position into accounts of the power of ideas and discourse.
Keywords: ideas; discourse; discursive institutionalism; historical institutionalism; rational
choice institutionalism; sociological institutionalism
Introduction
The three traditionally recognized ‘new institutionalisms’ of political science –
rational choice institutionalism (RI), historical institutionalism (HI), and sociological
institutionalism (SI) – have one thing in common: they have been much
* E-mail: vschmidt@bu.edu
1
better at explaining continuity than change. In all three frameworks for analysis,
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. Because of their
definitions of institutions, which they present largely as given, static, and constraining,
neo-institutionalist scholars in all three neo-institutionalisms have
mainly explained change as coming from the outside, as the result of exogenous
shocks. It is only relatively recently that they have sought to endogenize institutional
change, by looking to explain the origins of or shifts in interest-based
preferences, historical paths, or cultural frames. Although some such scholars
have sought to do this while remaining within their older neo-institutionalism,
others have turned to ideas and discourse. Just how many have done so in each of
the three neo-institutionalisms varies considerably, however, with relatively few
scholars working in the RI tradition, more in the HI tradition, and the most in the SI
tradition. But importantly, all those who have come to take ideas and discourse
seriously have broken with some of the fundamental presuppositions of their own
institutionalist tradition at the same time that they have come to share enough in
common to be identifiable as part of a fourth new institutionalism. And what they
share includes not only an analytic framework but also a commitment to go beyond
‘politics as usual’ to explain the politics of change, whether this means the role of
ideas in constituting political action, the power of persuasion in political debate,
the centrality of deliberation for democratic legitimation, the (re) construction of
political interests and values, or the dynamics of change in history and culture.
I name this fourth new analytic framework ‘discursive institutionalism’ (DI) to
call attention to the commonalities among the wide range of scholars who use
ideas and discourse to explain political change (and continuity) in institutional
context (see also Schmidt, 2002: Ch. 5, 2006: Ch. 5, 2008). And I label all
scholars who take ideas and discourse seriously as ‘discursive institutionalists’,
whether they themselves use this term, prefer instead to classify themselves within
one of the older institutionalist traditions, or have themselves come up with a
different, more specific term to identify their particular take on ideas and/or
discourse. Among these latter scholars, some focus primarily on the ideas side of
the framework, calling their approach the ‘ideational turn’ (Blyth, 2002), discursive
institutionalism (see Campbell and Pedersen, 2001), ideational institutionalism
(Hay, 2001), and constructivist institutionalism (Hay, 2006). Others
emphasize the discourse side, whether calling it discourse analysis (Hajer, 2003),
the argumentative turn (Fischer, 2003), or deliberative democracy (Dryzek, 2000).
Still others span the ideas/discourse divide, much like DI, whether through
approaches focusing on the ‘re´ferentiel’ (frame of reference) (Jobert, 1989; Muller,
2 V I V I E N A . S C H M I D T
1995) or on ‘advocacy coalitions’ (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith, 1993). Yet others
have resisted positing a fourth such institutionalism (e.g., Campbell (2004), but
see Campbell and Pedersen (2001)), mainly because they seek to blur the
boundaries among the three older institutionalisms in order to show how ideas
and discourse can serve to advance knowledge in the social sciences across
methodological approaches. For our purposes, which is to demonstrate how the
turn to ideas and discourse can take us beyond the limits of the three older neoinstitutionalisms
in order to explain the dynamics of change (and continuity), it is
more useful to identify the commonalities in all approaches that focus on ideas
and discourse as distinct from rationalist interests, path-dependent history, and
cultural framing.
Discursive institutionalism is an umbrella concept for the vast range of works in
political science that take account of the substantive content of ideas and the
interactive processes by which ideas are conveyed and exchanged through discourse.
On the substantive dimension of ideas and discourse, DI scholars consider
ideas about ‘what is and what ought to be’ at different levels of generality
(Schmidt, 2008; Mehta, 2010), going from policy ideas (e.g., Kingdon, 1984;
Hall, 1989) to programmatic ideas or paradigms (Hall, 1993; Berman, 1998) to
deeper philosophical ideas (Campbell, 2004). They also consider different types of
ideas, including cognitive ideas justified in terms of interest-based logics and
necessity (e.g., Jobert, 1989; Hall, 1993; Schmidt, 2002: Ch. 5) and normative
ideas legitimated through appeal to values and appropriateness (e.g., March and
Olsen, 1989; Schmidt, 2000). And they consider the representation of ideas
through discourse, including frames, narratives, myths, collective memories,
stories, scripts, and more (e.g., Roe, 1994; Hajer, 2003).
On the interactive dimension, DI scholars consider the discursive processes by
which such ideas are constructed in a ‘coordinative’ policy sphere and deliberated
in a ‘communicative’ political sphere (Schmidt, 2000, 2002). The coordinative
discourse encompasses the wide range of policy actors engaged in the construction
of policy ideas. They may be organized in ‘epistemic communities’ of elites with
shared ideas (Haas, 1992), ‘advocacy coalitions’ of elites with shared ideas
and policy access (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith, 1993), and ‘advocacy networks’ of
activists contesting ideas in international politics (Keck and Sikkink, 1998). Or
they may act as ‘entrepreneurs’ (Fligstein and Mara-Drita, 1996) and ‘mediators’
(Jobert, 1989; Muller, 1995) who serve as catalysts for the ideas of such discursive
communities.
The communicative discourse encompasses the wide range of political actors
who bring the ideas developed in the context of the coordinative discourse to the
public for deliberation and legitimation. These actors may include political leaders
involved in the top-down mass electoral process of public persuasion (see
e.g., Zaller, 1992; Mutz et al., 1996), in public debates (Art, 2006) or in the
‘policy forums’ of ‘informed publics’ (Rein and Scho¨n, 1991 engaged in ‘communicative
action’ (Habermas, 1996). Or they may be members of civil society
Taking ideas and discourse seriously 3
engaged in the bottom-up discursive interactions of grass-roots organizations,
social movements, ‘mini-publics’ (see Goodin and Dryzek, 2006), local
‘empowered participatory governance’ (Fung and Wright, 2003), and citizens
whose voices are heard not only in opinion polls but also in votes – where actions
speak even more loudly than words.
The ‘institutionalism’ in discursive institutionalism suggests that this approach is
not only about the communication of ideas or ‘text’ but also about the institutional
context in which and through which ideas are communicated via discourse. The
institutions of discursive institutionalism, however, are not the external rule-following
structures of the three older institutionalisms that serve primarily as constraints on
actors, whether as rationalist incentives, historical paths, or cultural frames. They are
instead simultaneously constraining structures and enabling constructs of meaning,
which are internal to ‘sentient’ (thinking and speaking) agents whose ‘background
ideational abilities’ explain how they create and maintain institutions at the same
time that their ‘foreground discursive abilities’ enable them to communicate critically
about those institutions, to change (or maintain) them (Schmidt, 2008). When discursive
institutionalists engage with any one of the older three neo-institutionalisms,
therefore, they tend to use their results as background information, whether as the
unproblematic basis for further inquiry – say, to elaborate on preference formation
and to elucidate critical junctures – or as the problematic assumptions to be investigated.
With regard to institutional change, this would involve demonstrating how
and when ideas in discursive interactions enable actors to overcome constraints
which explanations in terms of interests, path dependence, and/or culture present as
overwhelming impediments to action.
Discursive institutionalism thus shares with the other neo-institutionalisms a core
focus on the importance of institutions, but it differs in its definition of institutions,
in its objects and logics of explanation, and in the ways in which it deals with
change (see Table 1). Because the three older ‘new institutionalisms’ are well
known, as are their drawbacks, this article provides only brief sketches of these here
(for a fuller account, see Schmidt (2009a)). And because there is such a vast range
of scholarly ideas about ideas and discourse (see Goodin and Tilly, 2006: Pt IV), my
purpose is not to review them all here. Rather, it is to show how DI fits against the
other three new institutionalisms and, in doing so, to demonstrate that DI offers a
framework within which to theorize about the dynamics of institutional change.
The article begins with the turn to ideas first in RI, next in HI, and then in SI before
exploring the interactive dimension of discourse. The article concludes with a
consideration of the interrelationships among the four new institutionalisms.
Rational choice institutionalism and the turn to ideas
Rational choice institutionalism posits rational actors with fixed preferences who
calculate strategically to maximize their preferences, and for whom institutions
4 V I V I E N A . S C H M I D T
Table 1. The four new institutionalisms
Rational choice
institutionalism Historical institutionalism Sociological institutionalism Discursive institutionalism
Object of explanation Behavior of rational actors Structures and practices Norms and culture of social
agents
Ideas and discourse of sentient
agents
Logic of explanation Calculation Path-dependency Appropriateness Communication
Definition of institutions Incentive structures Macro-historical structures and
regularities
Cultural norms and frames Meaning structures and
constructs
Approach to change Static – continuity through
fixed preferences, stable
institutions
Static – continuity through
path dependency interrupted
by critical junctures
Static – continuity through
cultural norms and rules
Dynamic – change (and
continuity) through ideas and
discursive interaction
Explanation of change Exogenous shock Exogenous shock Exogenous shock Endogenous process through
background ideational and
foreground discursive abilities
Recent innovations to
explain change
Endogenous ascription of
interest shifts through RI
political coalitions or HI
self-reinforcing or selfundermining
processes
Endogenous description of
incremental change through
layering, drift, conversion
Endogenous construction
(merge with DI)
Endogenous construction through
reframing, recasting collective
memories and narratives
through epistemic communities,
advocacy coalitions,
communicative action,
deliberative democracy
RI 5 rational choice institutionalism; HI 5 historical institutionalism; DI 5 discursive institutionalism.
Takingideasanddiscourseseriously5
represent the incentive structures that reduce the uncertainties resulting from the
multiplicity of individual preferences and issues (see e.g., Hardin, 1982; Ostrom,
1990). This approach has arguably been the most resistant to the turn to ideas.
The ways in which DI deals with questions of interests and institutions challenges
the very premises of RI about the fixed nature of preferences and the stability of
institutions. Preference formation, moreover, which is at the center of DI concerns,
was until very recently of little interest to RI scholars, while institutional
change was ruled out analytically a priori. But critiques of RI – emphasizing its
economic determinism, its inability to deal with institutional change endogenously,
and its difficulties in accounting for preference formation (see e.g., Mansbridge,
1990; Green and Shapiro, 1994; Scharpf, 1997) – have led scholars in the RI
tradition in recent years to seek to ‘endogenize’ change.
In their attempts to find new ways to account for preference formation and
institutional shifts, RI scholars have mostly looked to political coalition formation,
although they have sometimes even sought a rapprochement with HI (e.g.,
Katznelson and Weingast, 2005). For example, Iversen and Soskice (2006) argue
that formal electoral institutions act as incentive structures that produce political
coalitions which implement certain kinds of socio-economic policies, more inegalitarian
in majoritarian systems, less inegalitarian in proportional ones. The
problem with such an approach is that it remains highly deterministic, as institutions
determine politics which determine political outcomes, and it still can’t
explain the origins of the institutions or of the political coalitions that created
them, let alone why they might change institutions or policies over time. In
contrast, Grief and Laitin (2004), in seeking to build HI insights into gametheoretic
analysis, redefine the goal of institutions – from ‘self-enforcing’ to selfreinforcing
or self-undermining institutions – and their effects – as ‘parametric’ in
the short term, meaning exogenous and fixed for agents who act on self-enforcing
beliefs, but only ‘quasi-parametric’ in the long run, meaning endogenous and
variable as individuals are led to act in a manner that does not reproduce the
associated beliefs. The problem here is that although this may better account for
change over time in game-theoretic terms, we are still left with the irrationality of
the choice of institutions to begin with; the deterministic trajectory of change over
time, now for better or worse; and the limited rationality of these supposedly
‘rational’ actors at any given point in time.
Relatively few RI scholars have turned to ideas to solve the problem of institutional
change. Among those who have, the most significant RI engagement
with ideas began in the 1990s, although it has remained rather circumscribed.
Goldstein (1993) and Goldstein and Keohane (1993) provide the classic exposition
of the RI approach to ideas (see also Weingast, 1995). They deem ideational
explanation useful only when and if explanation in terms of ‘objective’ or
‘material’ interests is insufficient, which may occur in one of three ways, each of
which is problematic in a different way. First, ideas may come before interests,
acting as ‘road maps’ for individual actors to clarify their goals or limit the range
6 V I V I E N A . S C H M I D T
of strategies to be taken – in which case ideas seem to determine interests, but we
have no explanation of the selection mechanism by which certain ideas get chosen
over others (Yee, 1997: 1024; Blyth, 2002: 16; Gofas and Hay, 2010). Second,
ideas may come after interests, acting as ‘focal points’ for actors to choose among
equally acceptable alternatives (i.e., multiple Pareto-improving equilibria) – in
which case ideas serve at best to ‘mop up’ residual variance, and we still can’t
explain the mechanism by which the now exogenously, interest-determined ideas
are picked (see Yee, 1997: 1025–1027; Blyth, 2002: 26; Gofas and Hay, 2010).
Third, ideas may be embedded in institutions, in which case it is the institutions
rather than the ideas that really matter to the actors (Yee, 1996; Gofas and Hay,
2010). A fourth-way RI scholars see ideas coming in is as after-the-fact legitimation
of actors’ interest-based action, following an instrumental logic, or as
‘hooks’ for elite interests (e.g., Shepsle, 1985) – in which case ideas are not really
taken seriously at all.
In all of these approaches, then, ideas have not gone very far beyond interests,
since they are little more than mechanisms for choosing among interests, focal
points for switching among equilibria (see critique by Ruggie, 1998: 866–867), or
after-the-fact justification for interest-based choices. Douglas North (1990) went
farther, first by using ideas to overcome the problem of how to explain institutional
construction, then by casting ideas as ‘shared mental modes’. However, as
Blyth (2003: 696–697, 2002: Ch. 2) argues, the contradictions inherent in both
such approaches may have been ‘a bridge too far’. First, if ideas create institutions,
then how can institutions make ideas ‘actionable’? But second, if instead
ideas are ‘mental modes’, then what stops ideas from having an effect on the
content of interests, and not just on the order of interests, which means that ideas
would constitute interests, rather than the other way around.
The problem for RI scholars, then, and the reason most of them quickly
abandoned the pursuit of ideas, is that they could not continue to maintain the
artificial separation of ‘objective’ interests from ‘subjective’ ideas about interests,
that is, beliefs and desires. Such subjective interests threatened to overwhelm the
objective ones which are at the basis of the rationalists’ thin model of rationality,
by undermining the ‘fixed’ nature of preferences and the notion of outcomes as a
function of pre-existing preferences. And without fixed preferences as well as
neutral institutional incentive structures, RI scholars lose the parsimony of the
approach and everything that follows from it, including the ability to mathematically
model games rational actors play as opposed to those ‘real actors play’
(see Scharpf, 1997; Rothstein, 2005: Ch. 1). This helps explain why the foray
into ideas for most dyed-in-the-wool RI scholars was short-lived. For those who
persisted, however, a whole new approach to the explanation of interests and
institutions has opened up.
For DI scholars engaged with the RI tradition, subjective interests replace the
objective ones of RI, as ideas about interests that bring in a much wider range of
strategic ideas and social norms that must be explained in terms of their meaning
Taking ideas and discourse seriously 7
to the actors within a given ‘meaning context’ rather than in terms of some set of
universally identifiable interests. Material interests, economic in particular, which
are at the basis of much of the institutional incentives in the rational choice
institutionalist literature, are not ignored. But in discursive institutionalism,
scholars tend to separate material interests analytically into material reality and
interests rather than to conflate them, such that material reality constitutes the
setting within which or in response to which agents may conceive of their interests
(see Schmidt, 2008).
The kind of knowledge and degree of certainty agents may have with regard to
their ideas about material reality may also differ, depending upon the aspect of
material reality with which they are concerned. Illustrative of this epistemological
observation is Wittgenstein’s (1972) little-noticed distinction between the languagegames
based on our everyday experiences in the world, which tend to admit of few
doubts or mistakes, and language-games based on our (social) scientific pictures of
the world, which may always allow for doubts, mistakes, and even gestalt switches
(see Schmidt, 2008). The problem with RI is that it tends to develop (social) scientific
pictures-games of the world that it treats as if they had the certainty of experiencegames
– a point also made by Taleb and Pilpel (2005; see discussion in Blyth, 2010),
who demonstrate that the world in which we live is a lot more uncertain than the
world of risk economists and rational choice institutionalists generally assume, given
the impossibility of knowing let alone statistically predicting the effects of all the
forces that may have an impact on economic and political realities.
As Blyth (2002: 31–39, 2010; see also Schmidt, 2008) argues, the problem with
RI is that it assumes that most phenomena are explainable in terms of ‘Knightian
risk’, because they are part of a directly observable world that agents can perceive
more or less well and in which they can calculate the subjective probability of the
likely outcomes of their preferences, such as in the US Congress. Such phenomena,
Blyth shows, are in actuality better explained in terms of ‘Knightian uncertainty’,
because they are part of a world that is not directly observable, such as the global
economy, in which agents are not simply unsure about how to achieve their
interests but unsure of what their interests are, given that the uncertainties are too
great, the moment unique, prediction impossible, and agents’ interests always
structurally underdetermined. Blyth (2002) illustrates this by noting that the
Great Depression in the 1930s and the economic crisis following the oil shocks of
the 1970s were cases of Knightian uncertainty for both the United States and
Sweden, as governments, business, and labor at these critical junctures all sought
to reconstitute interests through alternative ‘narratives’ and ‘causal stories’ about
the reasons for the crisis, seeking to produce new political coalitions for collective
action, with ideas serving as ‘weapons’ and ‘blueprints’ in the struggle to replace
existing institutions.
Woll (2008) demonstrates that there are also less dramatic instances of
Knightian uncertainty, such as the kind faced by multinational businesses lobbying
for the deregulation of international trade in services. Here, firms’ ideas about which
8 V I V I E N A . S C H M I D T
utility to maximize (interests), how to maximize it (strategies), and to what end
(goals) explains not only changes in their identity, as they moved from seeing
themselves as national champions to global players, but also changes in institutions,
as trade in services was developed in a context of single-level (US) games spurred by
business and multi-level (EU) games in which global liberalization was linked to
attempts to spur business support for liberalization in the member states. But Woll
(2008: 161), as she herself notes, reifies a single corporate rationality for the sake of
parsimony, and thus misses out on the negotiation processes inside firms as well as
between them that make for a much more complex ideational construction of
interests than the stylized one she developed.
Culpepper (2005) shows how one might zoom in to consider such ideational
processes in detail, in the institutional changes (or continuities) of the corporate
governance systems of France and Germany in the 1990s. In the case of France, he
argues that CEOs underwent a joint belief shift at a critical juncture, when a
central figure in the system of cross-shareholding exited, thereby ‘signalling’ an
idea that led to a shift in belief system when other French CEOs followed suit
after an exchange of ideas. German CEOs, by contrast, did not change the rules of
the game at their own critical juncture, when a major firm was taken over by a
foreign company, because the outsider nature of the takeover had little effect on
the CEOs’ belief system.
Culpepper’s approach has the advantage for RI of helping to maintain the
possibility of game-theoretic analysis, by positing an equilibrium state with fixed
preferences and stable institutions before and after the period of ideational
change. The disadvantage is that it formalizes an empirical process that was, in
reality, a lot more messy and uncertain than the discussion suggests (see Schmidt,
1997, 2002: Ch. 6), making ‘revolutionary’ a process of change that was a lot
more incremental. French CEOs had already voiced dissatisfaction with the system
prior to the central figure’s precipitating action while the Germans were a lot
more dissatisfied with the system, as was evident from their partial defection once
the rules were changed with regard to capital gains tax in 2002 (Schmidt, 2002:
Ch. 6; Kinderman, 2005). Moreover, by limiting the importance of ideas to the
period of uncertainty between the end of the old institutional ‘game’ and the
beginning of the newly agreed institutional ‘game’, we have changing DI ideas
within a critical moment preceded and followed by RI crystallized preferences and
frozen institutions.
Institutions, however, as Rothstein (2005) shows, also change over time as the
ideas that infuse them change. This is because, as he argues, institutions themselves
should not be treated as neutral structures of incentives but, rather, as the
carriers of ideas or ‘collective memories’ which make them objects of trust or
mistrust and changeable over time as actors’ ideas and discourse about them
change in tandem with changes in their performance. Rothstein (2005: 168–198)
illustrates this with the case of the long-term survival of the institutions of Sweden’s
collective bargaining system, which became the carriers of ideas or ‘collective
Taking ideas and discourse seriously 9
memories’ created at a critical juncture in the 1930s, when the system evolved
into the trusted ‘public institution’ based on peaceful and collaborative industrial
relations which continues to this day, despite changes related to the employers’
pull-out of the national centralized system.
Discursive institutionalist scholars who engage with the RI tradition, then, like
RI scholars, speak the language of interests, incentive structures, and collective
action. But they see these as infused with a wide range of ideas and norms rather
than narrowly focused on an instrumental rationality of utility-maximization,
with incentive structures normative rather than neutral, interests subjective rather
than objective, and their explanations, where these are RI ‘pictures of the world’,
much more uncertain than RI scholars recognize.
Historical institutionalism and the turn to ideas
Historical institutionalism focuses on how institutions, understood as sets of
regularized practices with rule-like qualities, structure action and outcomes.
It emphasizes not just the operation and development of institutions but also the
path-dependencies and unintended consequences that result from such historical
development (Steinmo et al., 1992; Hall and Taylor, 1996: 938; Thelen, 1999;
Pierson, 2000). HI has been more open to the turn to ideas than RI. This is because
whereas RI has certain ontological and epistemological presuppositions about
agency that clash with those of DI, HI lacks agency, for which HI scholars often turn
to RI or SI (see Hall and Taylor, 1996: 940–941) and, increasingly, to DI. Moreover,
critiques of HI – such as those that emphasize its historical determinism where
it focuses on critical junctures (e.g., Collier and Collier, 1991) leading to pathdependence
(Mahoney, 2000; Pierson, 2000), along with its inability to explain
institutional change endogenously, even if more recent HI scholars have succeeded
in describing incremental change, through layering, conversion, and drift (Thelen,
2004; Streeck and Thelen, 2005) – have left an opening to DI.
Whereas RI scholars have largely resisted the turn to ideas, HI scholars have been
divided over how far to go with regard to ideas. The question here is where the
tipping point is between HI scholars who continue to see institutions as constitutive
of ideas and those who might better be called DI scholars within a HI tradition
because they see ideas as constitutive of institutions even if shaped by them.
Interestingly enough, even in the book that gave HI its name (Steinmo et al., 1992),
the few chapters that were focused on ideas – those of Hall, King, and Weir – take
us beyond HI. Among these scholars, Hall’s work has arguably been the most
eclectic. It began as entirely HI on the differences in the political economic rules and
institutional role of the state in Britain and France (Hall, 1986), followed with a
largely HI approach to ideas focused on the priority of national institutional
structures to explain the differential influence of Keynesianism (Hall, 1989),
continued with a DI explanation of how Thatcher’s monetarist ideas were
10 V I V I E N A . S C H M I D T
constitutive of new institutions (Hall, 1993), and ended with a switch to a RI
analysis of firm-centered coordination in HI-differentiated varieties of capitalism
(Hall and Soskice, 2001).
By contrast, both King (1999) and Weir (2006) have moved into DI within the
HI tradition. In his book on illiberal social policy in Britain and the US, King
(1999) focuses on the role of ideas and knowledge in the making of immigration
policy, although the book also retains a strong HI component with its emphasis on
how institutional context made it easier for the centralized British government to
take up ideas and impose reform than in the federal US. Recently, moreover, Weir
has critiqued the approaches to agency of both HI and RI, arguing that in order to
be able to explain organized labor’s efforts to redefine itself as a political actor in
the US and to build new coalitions (Weir, 2006), we need to add to RI explanations
of interest calculations a focus on relational and cognitive factors in terms of
‘the processes of power and persuasion’.
More recent work in historical institutionalism, such as the edited volume of
Streeck and Thelen (2005) focused on incremental institutional change, is also
split between authors who look to RI for agency and those who look more to DI.
Thus, whereas the introduction to the volume tends to theorize the dynamics of
change primarily in HI and RI terms, explaining layering, drift, and conversion
by way of rational actors engaged in ‘on-going skirmishing as actors try to achieve
advantage by interpreting or redirecting institutionsy’ (Streeck and Thelen,
2005: 19), a number of the authors in the volume emphasize the importance of
ideas (i.e., Jackson, Deeg, Palier, Quark and Djelic). Among these, Palier (2005)
mixes HI and DI (in the HI tradition) when he offers a critique of theories of
ideational change based on paradigms (as per Hall, 1993) by showing that French
welfare state reform underwent revolutionary institutional change without any
abrupt shift in goals, core ideas, or objectives as policy actors ‘layered’ new
‘recipes’ for social policy onto the old. In contrast, Quack and Djelic (2005) mix
HI and DI (in the SI tradition) when they explain the ‘path generation’, combination,
and recombination of anti-trust policies in Germany and the EU in terms
of institutional entrepreneurs and epistemic communities with new ideas, beginning
with how American occupation authorities with pro-competition ideas put
like-minded German actors in positions of authority, which in turn gave them an
advantage in the subsequent battle of ideas.
These examples raise more theoretical questions about how to reconcile HI and
DI. For some DI scholars in the HI tradition, HI and DI can fit easily together,
with HI providing structures, DI agency. For example, in his history of racial
incorporation in America, Lieberman (2005) argues that ideas (actors’ goals) may
give us motive but not opportunity, which is established by the institutions (the
rules that bind actors) which not only constrain political behavior but also
structure political openings for mobilization and articulation of interests. The
problem with this mix is that it risks papering over some very real differences
between HI and DI, in particular that HI portrays institutions as constraining
Taking ideas and discourse seriously 11
structures external to actors whereas DI defines institutions as internal ideational
constructs and structures (discussed below). Moreover, it leaves open the question of
whether there can be a specifically HI approach to agency. Only Steinmo and Lewis
(n/a) have actually proposed such an endogenous account of agency, using evolutionary
biology to explain institutional change in terms of how populations’ genetic
predispositions combined with environmental factors make for the success, replication,
proliferation, and genetic feed-back of certain preferences. The problem with
this approach, from a DI perspective, is that it appears mechanistic, with no sense of
the critical thinking of ‘sentient agents’ (read real people) consciously changing their
institutions – for better or for worse – through deliberation, contestation, as well as
consensus-building around ideas.
One way out of this dilemma is to separate the HI examination of the institutional
context of historical rules and regularities, critical junctures, and incremental change
from the DI analysis, which could then use the results of the HI investigation as
background information. This would help show how sentient agents infuse HI rules
with contextualized meanings, construct understandings and responses to critical
moments, or come up with the ideas that lead to the ‘layering’ of one institution over
another, the ‘reinterpretation’ of an institution, or the ‘conversion’ of agents to
another institution. This kind of two-step institutionalist approach is what I
(Schmidt, 2006) have done in examining the differential impact of the EU on its
member-states’ democracies. I demonstrate that HI helps account for the greater
challenges to ‘simple’ polities such as France and the UK, in which governing
authority is focused on the executive, by the ‘highly compound’ EU than to similarly
‘compound’ polities like Germany and Italy, where governing authority is more
dispersed. But it cannot explain these countries’ differing responses to the EU,
because institutional design is not destiny. Also necessary is a DI explanation of the
role of legitimizing ideas as well as persuasive discourse in promoting (or not) public
acceptance of the European Union.
Other DI scholars interweave HI and DI together in discussions of evolutionary
changes across time, while giving primacy to the ways in which evolving ideas
affect changes in institutions. For example, in her contrast between the failures of
social democrats in Germany to stem the Nazi tide and their success in Sweden in
the run-up to World War II, Berman (1998) demonstrates that the explanation has
a lot to do with the differences in the programmatic beliefs of German Social
Democrats, who capitulated before Nazism in large measure because they could
not think beyond their long-held Marxist ideas, and those of Swedish Social
Democrats, who succeeded in not only fighting fascism but also in creating a
social democratic state because they were free of any such ideational legacy and
were therefore able to reinvent socialism.
This said, DI does not purport to explain all change – this would be a big
mistake since ‘stuff happens’, events outside of peoples’ control occur all the time,
material conditions do change, actions often have unintended consequences, and
actors often act without prior ideas and discourse about what it is that they will
12 V I V I E N A . S C H M I D T
do. As HI scholars remind us, processes of change are often unconscious – as
people may act without any clear sense of what they are doing, creating new
practices as a result of ‘bricolage’ and destroying old ones as a result of ‘drift’
(Thelen, 2004; Streeck and Thelen, 2005). DI, however, shows that much change
can and should be explained in terms of sentient agents’ ideas about what to
change (or continue) – if nothing else, in response to occurrences on the outside,
that is, to the stuff that happens.
Discursive institutionalist scholars who engage with the HI tradition, then, like
HI scholars, also speak the language of institutional rules and regularities, critical
moments and incremental change. It is just that they infuse these ‘structures’ with
‘agency’, by focusing on the ideas of real actors that help explain changes or
continuities in institutions, at critical moments or incrementally over time.
Sociological institutionalism and the turn to ideas
Sociological institutionalist focuses on the forms and procedures of organizational
life stemming from culturally specific practices, with institutions cast as the
norms, cognitive frames, scripts, and meaning systems that guide human action
according to a ‘logic of appropriateness’ (March and Olsen, 1989; DiMaggio and
Powell, 1991; Scott, 1995). In SI, therefore, one cannot talk about a turn to ideas
as such, since ideas have always been at the basis of the approach – as norms,
frames, and meaning systems. The differences between SI and DI, therefore, are
often quite fuzzy, and depend upon whether scholars see ideas more as culturally
determined, static ideational structures and institutions – as macro-patterns
consisting of ‘action without agents’ (Hall and Taylor, 1996: 954) or, worse,
structures without agents (see Checkel, 1998: 335) – or whether they take a more
dynamic approach to ideas.
On the SI side are constructivists like Katzenstein who, while a rationalist HI
scholar in his earlier work on small European states’ political economic responses
to international pressures (Katzenstein, 1985), turns into a constructivist SI
scholar in later work on how interests develop from state identities to structure
national perceptions of defense and security issues (Katzenstein, 1996). On the DI
side, by contrast, are constructivists who present ideas as more dynamic, that is,
as norms, frames, and narratives that not only establish how actors conceptualize
the world but also enable them to reconceptualize the world, serving as a resource
to promote change through ‘structuration’ (Wendt, 1987: 359–360). This may
occur through international activists’ diffusion of international norms in developing
countries (e.g., Finnemore, 1996), through European leaders’ reconstruction
of state identities and ideas about European integration (Risse, 2001),
through British leaders’ articulation of neo-liberal ideas in Britain (Hay, 2001), or
through the social activists of the ‘Save the Whale’ movement’s discourse, which
was extremely effective in a relatively short span of time in moving ideas about
Taking ideas and discourse seriously 13
whales from nasty, dangerous creatures (as Moby Dick) to endangered species
worthy of protection and even affection (as Moby Doll) (Epstein, 2008).
Discursive institutionalist scholars who engage with the SI tradition, then, like
SI scholars, also speak the language of cultural framing, ideas, and discourse. It is
just that they ensure that these are more dynamic and, thereby, better able to
explain institutional change (and continuity).
Importantly, the constructivist DI scholars go beyond the SI scholars who put
ideas into cultural context to put them into their ‘meaning’ context as well, that is,
by treating ideas as empirical subjects to be studied in their own right (e.g., Kjaer
and Pedersen, 2001; Hay, 2006). And such meaning contexts constitute very
different kinds of institutions from those of RI, HI, and SI.
For the three older neo-institutionalisms, institutions are structures external to
agents that constitute rules about acting in the world that serve mainly as constraints
– whether by way of rationalist incentives that structure action, historical
paths that shape action, or cultural norms that frame action. For DI, by contrast,
institutions are internal to sentient agents, serving both as structures (of thinking
and acting) that constrain action and as constructs (of thinking and acting) created
and changed by those actors. This internal capacity to create and maintain
institutions derives from agents’ ‘background ideational abilities’ (Schmidt,
2008). This is a generic term for what Searle (1995) defines as the ‘background
abilities’ which encompass human capacities, dispositions, and know-how related
to how the world works and how to cope with it; or for what Bourdieu (1990: 11)
describes as the ‘habitus’ in which humans beings act ‘following the intuitions of a
‘‘logic of practice’’’. But the psychology of cognitive dissonance is also relevant
here, which shows that people generally act without thinking and only become
conscious of the rules that might apply if they are in contradiction (Harmon-Jones
and Mills, 1999). These background ideational abilities underpin agents’ ability
to make sense in a given meaning context, that is, to ‘get it right’ in terms of the
ideational rules or ‘rationality’ of a given discursive institutional setting.
But how, then, do we theorize about the process through which sentient agents
‘get it right’ or, better, manage to bring about change in the ideational rules?
Theoretical approaches in DI on how to plot change in ideas remain underdeveloped,
despite much empirical analysis on changes in ideas. The most popular
theories of ideational change, those that focus on paradigm shifts, are arguably
the most problematic in this instance. This is mainly because, however evocative
the concept of paradigm shift may be as a metaphor for change, the theory itself
has problems similar to the HI critical juncture literature. It fails to specify closely
enough the process of ideational change, that is, how old ideas fail and new ideas
come to the fore, the reasons for ideational change, that is, why certain ideas are
taken up rather than others, and the timing of ideational change, since paradigmtheory’s
emphasis on abrupt shifts in ideas rules out not only evolutionary change
but also revolutionary change in ideas that is not abrupt (Skogstad and Schmidt,
n/a). One promising way forward is to build on the work of discourse analysts
14 V I V I E N A . S C H M I D T
(e.g., Howarth et al., 2000; Kjaer and Pedersen, 2001) who theorize the process of
ideational change by showing how different elements may be added to ideas,
thereby bringing about change in ideas incrementally even in times of stability,
and not just at critical junctures during ‘paradigm’ shifts (see Carstensen, n/a).
There is one final problem with this focus on ideas, which is that we have yet to
fully explain the dynamics of institutional change. Although concentrating on ideas
gets us closer to why institutional changes occur, they still don’t explain how such
institutional changes occur, that is, how the ideas themselves promote institutional
change. For this, however, we need to consider another aspect of discursive institutionalism,
which is the interactive side of discourse. How ideas are generated
among policy actors and communicated to the public by political actors through
discourse is the key to explaining institutional change (and continuity).
Discourse as interactive process and the three older new institutionalisms
Most of the DI scholars just discussed tend to deal mainly with ideas, leaving the
interactive processes of discourse implicit as they discuss the ‘carriers’ of ideas who
generate, deliberate, and legitimize ideas within given institutional contexts. Other
DI scholars, however, have gone farther to formalize the interactive processes of
ideas generation, deliberation, and legitimization. Some use the term discourse
for this, despite the fact that many political scientists avoid what sometimes conjures
up exaggerated visions of ‘post-structuralists’ or post-modernists who, they (often
unfairly) assume, consider words without deeds, text without context. The term
itself, however, used generically to describe not only what is said, or the ideas that
are the substantive content of discourse, but also who said what to whom where and
why, as the interactive processes of discourse in the coordinative policy sphere and
the communicative political sphere, is of great help in explaining the dynamic
processes of institutional change (see Schmidt, 2008).
Without discourse, understood as the exchange of ideas, it is very difficult to
explain how ideas go from individual thought to collective action. We don’t, after all,
know what people are thinking or why they act the way they do until they say it. And
we don’t for the most part engage in collective action or in collective (re)thinking of
our actions without the articulation, discussion, deliberation, and legitimization of
our ideas about our actions. This is why, in addition to the background ideational
abilities that explain the internal processes by which institutions are created and
maintained, we need to identify the ‘foreground discursive abilities’ through which
sentient agents may change (or maintain) their institutions following a logic of
communication (Schmidt, 2008). This is a generic term for what Habermas (1996)
calls ‘communicative action’, and it is at the basis of theories about deliberative and
discursive democracy (e.g., Dryzek, 2000), about public debate (Art 2006), as well
about coordinative discourses of policy construction and communicative discourses
of political communication (Schmidt, 2002, 2006).
Taking ideas and discourse seriously 15
These foreground discursive abilities are essential to explaining institutional
change, because they refer to peoples’ ability to think outside the institutions in
which they continue to act, to talk about such institutions in a critical way, to
communicate and deliberate about them, to persuade themselves as well as others
to change their minds about their institutions, and then to take action to change
them, whether by building ‘discursive coalitions’ for reform against entrenched
interests in the coordinative policy sphere or informing and orienting the public in
the communicative political sphere. Conveying ‘good’ policy ideas through a
persuasive discourse helps political actors win elections and gives policy actors a
mandate to implement their ideas.
Scholars in the SI tradition have little difficulty with this approach to discourse,
especially since discourse analyses of all kinds are loosely seen as part of SI (e.g.,
Bourdieu, 1990; Campbell and Pedersen, 2001; Campbell, 2004). Moreover, even
when the word ‘discourse’ is not used, DI scholars in the SI tradition often
elucidate its interactive effects, as in recent work on ‘contentious politics’ (e.g.,
Aminzade et al., 2001), which weds organizational and social movements theory,
adding ideas about threat to RI and HI opportunity structures, emotions to RI
instrumentality on the nature of protest, and a focus on ideational leadership,
among other things. Equally importantly, the case studies offer evidence of how
leaders, social movement activists, and the everyday public spur change through
ideas that persuade through discourse.
Scholars in the HI tradition also have little difficulty with discourse, since DI
can add dynamics to the historical processes of ideational change, by focusing on
who talks to whom where and when. By the same token, however, HI can add
insight into DI, by describing the formal institutional contexts that shape interactive
patterns of discourse. Institutional setting, for example, helps explain why
simple polities like France and the UK, in which reform agendas are generally
decided by a restricted elite, tend to have more elaborate communicative discourses
to the public – so as to legitimate those reforms – than in compound
polities like Germany and Italy, which tend to have more elaborate coordinative
discourses among policy actors – so as to reach agreement among the much wider
range of actors involved in negotiating reform (Schmidt, 2000, 2002, 2006). The
HI context could alternatively be seen to shape different forms of deliberative
governance processes, with top-down governance patterns combined with
adversarial interactions leading to traditional interest group politics, participatory
governance with collaborative interactions leading to ‘empowered participatory
governance’ (Fung and Wright, 2003).
Scholars in the RI tradition have the greatest difficulty dealing with the interactive
process of discourse, or taking the exchange of ideas in public debates seriously,
because talk is by definition ‘cheap’ while instrumental actions ‘speak more loudly
than words’. One example should suffice in illustration: In his ‘analytic narrative’ of
the 1896 National Democratic Convention, Bensel (2005) notes that RI can easily
explain the ‘well-structured game’ to make the silver standard the main plank of the
16 V I V I E N A . S C H M I D T
party program but dismisses out of hand the possibility of explaining the presidential
nomination of William Jennings Bryan, because of the contingency of the nomination
and the ‘role of passion’ which ensured that ‘what happened remains in the
domain of the art of politics’ (Bensel, 2005: 45–47). But is it not possible that
Bryan’s nomination was at least in part due to his ability to put into words what
delegates thought about the ‘cross of gold’ in a way that resonated with their values?
Can’t the substance of ideas matter, in other words, as part of the persuasive power
of discourse? Levi (2006), in her presidential address at the American Political
Science Association, tacitly acknowledges this when she calls for research on
leaders’ communication because leaders have ‘the power to inspire changeythe
capacity to change constituents’ beliefs’ (Levi, 2006: 12–13) – although she never
engages with DI work on leadership, discourse, or deliberative democracy.
Rational-choice institutionalism’s problems with ideas, discourse, and deliberation
follow from its restricted definition of agency and rationality. In RI, agents
are rational in an unthinking manner, meaning that they respond to incentive
structures in ways so as to maximize their interests (expected utility), pursuing
their goals in accordance with their beliefs about the facts. In DI, agents are
rational in a thinking manner: they also pursue their goals in accordance with
their beliefs about the facts but – as already noted – they are not only able to
think, say, and act but also to think about their thoughts, reflect upon their
actions, state their intentions, alter their actions as a result of their thoughts about
their actions, and say what they are thinking of doing and change their minds in
response to persuasion by others regarding what they are thinking, saying, and
doing. Such self-consciousness and self-knowledge along with the ability to
express it is summed up in the term ‘sentient’ when used to define agents in DI
(scholars also use the term ‘reflexive) – by contrast with RI’s ‘rational’ agents.
This distinction between RI and DI approaches to agents is what Petit (2006:
38–47) describes as the difference between the ‘decision-theoretic’ image of persons,
in which interaction is based on manipulation, as agents calculate how they
will influence others in order to serve their own interests, and the ‘discoursetheoretic’
image as found, for example, in Habermas on discourse as ‘communicative
action’ (1996). The problem for RI scholars as a result of their definition
of interaction as manipulation is that they cannot explain how one overcomes
entrenched interests – that is, ones that cannot be coerced, tricked, or bribed into
changing their actions. By contrast, in DI change in interests can come from
persuasion, as agents can reason together because they are aware that the other is
just as aware as they are about how they might be thinking about their interests in
accordance with their beliefs (Petit, 2006: 44–46).
Discursive institutionalist approaches focused on ‘deliberative democracy’, in
particular, have elaborated on such insights related to communicative action.
Deliberative democracy is seen to occur when parties are reasonable and use
evidence-based arguments to reach agreement, where persuasion is the key to
creating shared understandings and building consensus, and in which the process
Taking ideas and discourse seriously 17
itself is based on inclusive, open, trusting, and consensual interaction (Mansbridge,
1983; Bohman, 1996; Dryzek, 2000; Fung and Wright, 2003). Deliberative
democracy is considered to be a better form of decision-making because open
dialogue may unlock untapped knowledge, generate new skills and know-how,
produce higher-quality reasoning for more legitimate policies, and create new, more
collaborative interrelationships among the parties to the deliberation (Elster, 1998).
But while for some, this is the opposite of the RI view of politics as adversarial
(Mansbridge, 1983) and is incompatible with instrumental bargaining – in particular
Habermas (1996; see also Risse, 2001), for others, ‘arguing’ and ‘bargaining’
can be combined (e.g., Young, 1996), since one can argue to defend one’s interests
while being strategic in persuading others as to the appropriateness of one’s
viewpoint (see Holzinger, 2004). Moreover, power and interests cannot easily be
eliminated from deliberations in either policy or political spheres (Shapiro, 1999),
although being aware of these may help governments to set up institutional
arrangements and incentives in deliberative situations to minimize the potential
effects of domination (Shapiro, 2003: Ch. 2). Awareness of power and interests or
even manipulation is no guarantee of success, however, as evidenced by the case of
‘participatory-deliberative public administration’ in South Africa, in which civil
society groups brought into the official deliberative process had persuasive ideational
power only for cases in which they had other power resources as well, such
as the ability to mobilize (Baccaro and Papadakis, 2008).
Deliberation on its own, in other words, does not necessarily ensure a more
‘democratic’ outcome. Power and position do matter. The question is how to
define power and position in such a way as to also take account of the power of
ideas and discourse. The problem with RI and HI is that they tend to reify
questions of power and position by assuming that power is a function of position
and that agents’ strategic interests derive primarily from their power and position.
DI holds instead that power cannot be defined by (objective) position alone, since
ideas and values infuse the exercise of power and (subjective) perceptions of
position (Lukes, 2005). Moreover, actors can gain power from their ideas even
where they may lack the power of position – as in the case of social movements or
entrepreneurial actors who set the agenda for reform in policy or political spheres.
Power itself, moreover, derives not only from position, meaning actors’ ability to
wield power, but also purpose, since actors’ ideas and discourse about how they
can and should wield that power (i.e., not just in their own strategic interests but
in the general interest) may reinforce or undermine the power they derive from
their position, depending upon the responses of their audience to their stated
purposes. This is the essence of political leadership.
Further support for the view that discourse and deliberation are necessary
complements to investigations of power, position, and interests also comes from
experimental political psychology, which seeks to probe the nature and limits of
(RI-defined) human rationality, in particular with regard to ‘framing effects’.
Framing effects occur when different but logically equivalent phrases cause
18 V I V I E N A . S C H M I D T
individuals to alter their preferences ‘irrationally’, for example, when people
reject a policy program when told its negative effects (it leads to 5% unemployment)
and accept it when told its positive effects (it leads to 95% employment)
(Kahneman, 2000; Druckman, 2004). This represents a blow to RI, which
assumes total information on the part of rational actors, at the same time that it
provides an opening for DI. This is because ‘framing effects’ are shown to be
moderated by ‘contextual forces’ involving elite competition and ‘rhetoric’ that
result in ‘a process of framing and counter-framing’ (DI’s communicative discourse),
interpersonal conversation in heterogeneous groups among citizens (DI’s
deliberative democracy), or discussions among homogenous groups of experts
(DI’s coordinative discourse) (Druckman, 2004). This being said, experimental
political psychology also demonstrates the limits of deliberative effectiveness and
the importance of not idealizing deliberation, given principles of human cognition
that point to limited attention spans, cases in which communication may reduce
participants’ persuasiveness, and the importance of power relationships (Lupia
and McCubbins, 1998; Druckman and Lupia, 2006).
One final illustration of the value of DI approaches to the explanation of
change (and continuity) comes from the insights it can lend to the debates in
political economy on the development of capitalism over the past 30 years, which
have been dominated by the three older neo-institutionalisms (see Schmidt,
2009b). A DI analysis of these debates shows not only that particular ideas are
embedded in the very analytic frameworks of these neo-institutionalist approaches
but also that neo-institutionalist scholars actually use these approaches as
part of discursive strategies to propound their own particular normative views of
capitalism. For example, RI accounts of capitalism tend to present convergence
to a single neo-liberal model as inevitable, given the structures of economic
incentives that lead all economic actors to respond (rationally) in one way alone
(e.g., Cerny, 1994). For those RI scholars in favor of a neo-liberal model, but also
for those opposed, these ideas form the basis of a normative discursive strategy
focused on getting people to accept, or revolt against, this inevitability. HI
accounts of capitalism (in particular where they combine with RI) do not just
make things appear inevitable, they make them seem inexorable when they argue
for divergence to two varieties of capitalism based on the differing path-dependent
logics of coordination of liberal market economies and coordinated market
economies (e.g., Hall and Soskice, 2001). HI scholars who propound this binary
view of capitalism tend to be opposed to neo-liberal capitalism, and are engaged
in a normative discursive strategy focused on getting people to accept the validity
of two ways, not one, of being capitalist. SI accounts of capitalism dispute both
the inevitability of neo-liberal convergence and the inexorability of binary market
divergence since they present national forms of capitalism as culturally embedded
and therefore incomparable (e.g., Crouch, 2005). This is in itself part of a normative
discursive strategy to resist attempts to impose any kind of internationalized
order on national economies.
Taking ideas and discourse seriously 19
And what kinds of ideas and normative discourse are embedded in DI accounts
of capitalism, then? That there is nothing inevitable about the neo-liberal model
or anything inexorable about a binary split in varieties or incomparable about
culturally embedded forms of capitalism. DI leaves the future open to new ideas
conveyed by discourse, since it shows that rationalist logics, historical pathdependencies,
and cultural frames are conditional on public choices that result not
just from the power clash among interests, the prerogatives of position, or the
scripts of culture but from the battle of ideas through discourse and deliberation.
The current economic meltdown demonstrates better than anything the ideational
underpinnings to one, two, and many views of capitalisms.
Conclusion
In summary, while some scholars have moved from one of the older neoinstitutionalisms
to DI, others straddle institutionalisms, and yet others remain
squarely within one or another institutionalist approach. To get a sense of how all
of this fits together in a very general way, Figure 1 situates many of the scholars’
Positivism Constructivism
interests history culture
RI HI SI
static
Ostrum …Powell/Dimaggio..
Hardin …..Katzenstein 1985 ….
Iversen/Soskice ….Hall 1986…
…. Hall 2001…. Scott
........Grief/Laitin....
..….Scharpf… …March/Olson…
....Schmidt 2002, 2006.....
Bensel/ Levi .....Thelen….
….Weingast..
Goldstein/Keohane ......Katzenstein 1996…
…..Hall 1989…
ideas norms
Culpepper.... Hall 1993…
..Woll.... Lieberman
….Sabatier…. … .. .....Weir….King........
…..Haas…… Berman …......Campbell/Pedersen....
… Blyth … …Wendt…
............…..Campbell.................
… ….Risse….
.. Rothstein.... ….Hay…..
….Muller/Jobert… Art
…..Schmidt 2000, 2002, 2006...
dynamic
discourse DI discourse
Figure 1 Scholars’ use of the four new institutionalisms: rational choice institutionalism
(RI), historical institutionalism (HI), sociological institutionalism (SI), and discursive
institutionalism (DI).
20 V I V I E N A . S C H M I D T
works cited above within each of the four institutionalisms while arraying these
along a horizontal continuum from positivism to constructivism – going from
interests to culture, with history in between – and along a vertical continuum from
statics to dynamics, with interests, history, and culture at the static end, ideas and
discourse at the dynamic end (see Figure 1). HI sits between RI and SI, mainly
because RI and SI are largely incompatible, whereas HI can go to either side when
it adds agency. DI comes underneath all three because, although it is distinctive, it
can rest upon the insights of any one of the three and because scholars often see
themselves as continuing to fit into one or another of the traditions even as they
cross the line into DI.
This leaves us with one final question: what is the value-added of approaches that
take ideas and discourse seriously, by contrast with the other three new institutionalisms?
DI endogenizes change, explaining much of how and why public actors
bring about institutional change through public action. With regard to the other
institutionalisms, moreover, the discursive approach helps to explain the actual
preferences and strategies of actors in RI and HI, and it helps to explain changes in
the normative orientations emphasized by SI. Where DI can go wrong is when it
considers ideas and discourse to the exclusion of issues of power (read RI instrumental
rationality) and position (read HI institutional structures), when it assumes
that DI deliberation necessarily trumps RI manipulation, or when it over-determines
the role of ideas and discourse by forgetting that ‘stuff happens’ or that historical
institutions and cultural frames affect the ways in which ideas are expressed and
discourse conveyed. We should not forget that ideas and discourse that seek to
promote change often have little effect on the crystallized ideas about rationalist
interests and cultural norms or on the frozen landscapes of rationalist incentives,
historical paths, and cultural frames. The research agenda for DI, therefore, should
not just be to seek to convince political scientists theoretically that ideas and discourse
matter – by now all neo-institutionalists seem to have accepted this to some
degree – but to show empirically how, when, where, and why ideas and discourse
matter for institutional change, and when they do not.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Daniel Be´land, Mark Blyth, Robert Cox, John L. Campbell,
Bob Goodin, Colin Hay, Peter Katzenstein, Paulette Kurzer, Michael Lister, Fritz
Scharpf, Martin Schro¨der, Kathleen Thelen, and Daniel Wincott for their
insightful suggestions at a much earlier stage of the manuscript, and the three
anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments for this version.
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