Ideas, Institutions, and Political Order: Explaining Political Change

TLDR

Institutional and ideational explanations of politics share common limitations—reductionism, reliance on exogenous factors, and an overemphasis on ordered regularity—that make it difficult to account for episodes of political change. The study proposes relaxing the focus on order by treating politics as situated in multiple, sometimes non‑equilibrated orders, thereby synthesizing institutional and ideational perspectives to better explain political change. According to the authors, change emerges from friction between mismatched institutional and ideational patterns. An illustration using American civil‑rights policy in the 1960s and 1970s demonstrates that this friction‑based account can explain the policy shift in ways that neither pure institutional nor pure ideational explanations can.

Abstract

Institutional approaches to explaining political phenomena suffer from three common limitations: reductionism, reliance on exogenous factors, and excessive emphasis on order and structure. Ideational approaches to political explanation, while often more sensitive to change and agency, largely exhibit the same shortcomings. In particular, both perspectives share an emphasis on discerning and explaining patterns of ordered regularity in politics, making it hard to explain important episodes of political change. Relaxing this emphasis on order and viewing politics as situated in multiple and not necessarily equilibrated order suggests a way of synthesizing institutional and ideational approaches and developing more convincing accounts of political change. In this view, change arises out of “friction” among mismatched institutional and ideational patterns. An account of American civil rights policy in the 1960s and 1970s, which is not amenable to either straightforward institutional or ideational explanation, demonstrates the advantages of the approach.