Fundamentals of Political Science

1. Fundamentals of Political Science Dr. Sujian Guo Professor of Political Science San Francisco State Unversity Email: sguo@sfsu.edu http://bss.sfsu.edu/sguo

2. Definitions Institutionsare social, political, economic, and cultural structures, customs, practices, and mechanisms of social cooperation, order and governance that determine the rules of games that govern the behavior of individuals. Institutions are manifest in both formal organizations and informal social order and organization.

3. Institutionalism • Institutionalism is a method by which scholars take institutions as subject of study in order to find and trace patterns and sequences of social, political, economic behavior and change across time and space. It relies heavily on case studies, and most of these studies rely heavily on the study of formal institutions or the formal rules (i.e. the law). Moreover, they were highly normative and deterministic, such as the linearity of history as Hegel, Marx and others did. Marx’s arguments relied on “social class,” Weber on “bureaucracy,” Durkheim on “the division of labor,” which identifies it as the sole determination of social changes. This is often called “old institutionalism.”

4. New Institutionalism New Institutionalism avoids the deterministic approaches to history and emphasizes the autonomous role of institutions in shaping human behavior and history. Institutions are treated as “actors” making choices based on some “collective” interests, preferences, goals, alternatives, and expectations. goals. This is referred to as “rationality.”

5. Historical institutionalism • For historical institutionalism, the actors are both determined by and are producers of history. Recognizes that institutions operate in an environment consisting of other institutions, called the institutional environment. Much of the research deals with the influence of institutions on human behavior through rules, norms, and other frameworks, in other words, “the common research agenda is the study of institutional effects wherever and however they occur” – “the theoretical core” (Ellen Immergut, 1998: 25)

6. Two Major Approaches • Game theory has been used to study institutions to examine how institutions emerge and develop, and how institutions affect behavior, with the focus on behavior arising from a given set of institutional rules of games. Therefore, institutions are treated as an important strategic context, imposing constraints on self-interested behavior.

7. Game theory • For example, when the rules (institutions) are changed, the prisoner’s choices (to defect or to cooperate) also change because these rules constitute the context in which the prisoner (political actors) defines their strategies and choices. • Along the same methodological line, public choice theory examines how government policy choices are initiated, made, implemented, and seeks to determine what the policy outcomes are likely to be, given a particular political decision-making process and context. (organizational theory follow the same methodological line)

8. Historical-interpretive institutionalism • Historical-interpretive institutionalism shares the same premise in the role of institutions with rational choice institutionalists, but they differ with them in that • rationality is considered “overly confining” • political actors are not “all knowing” and “rational maximizers” • political actors are rule followers even when so doing may be not in their self-interest – “path dependence” and “unintended consequences” (Peter Hall, 1993: 941).

9. “Path dependence” • Path dependence is that “once actors have ventured far down a particular path, they are likely to find it very difficult to reverse course… Path dependence analysis highlights the role of ‘historical causation’ in which dynamics triggered by an event or process at one point in time reproduce themselves, even in the absence of the recurrence of the original event or process.” (Skocpol and Pierson, 2002: 665-6) The same force may not generate the same results everywhere as the effect of such forces vary from one context to another shaped by the contextual features of a given situation inherited from the past. ((Peter Hall, 1993: 941)

10. Historical-interpretive institutionalism • Historical and rational choice institutionalists also differ in the issue of preference formation. • The former believes that individual strategies and choices are more a function of institutions and structures rather than their individual choices • Individuals are motivated by a complex mix of preferences rather than a fixed set of preferences. • Therefore, they focus on what individuals are trying to maximize, why they emphasize certain goals over others, and how these processes occur in a given historical context.