Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms
1996/12/01 by Peter A. Hall, Rosemary C. R. Taylor · 6,717 citations
Business, Management and Accounting · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · #Economic Theory and Institutions #Law #Political Influence and Corporate Strategies #Political Science Research and Education #Political economy #Political science #Politics #Sociology
paper · doi:10.1111/j.1467-9248.1996.tb00343.x
published in Political Studies 44(5), 936-957 (SAGE Publishing)
openalex publication_date 1996/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
Abstract
The ‘new institutionalism’ is a term that now appears with growing frequency in political science. However, there is considerable confusion about just what the ‘new institutionalism’ is, how it differs from other approaches, and what sort of promise or problems it displays. The object of this essay is to provide some preliminary answers to these questions by reviewing recent work in a burgeoning literature. Some of the ambiguities surrounding the new institutionalism can be dispelled if we recognize that it does not constitute a unified body of thought. Instead, at least three different analytical approaches, each of which calls itself a ‘new institutionalism’, have appeared over the past fifteen years. We label these three schools of thought: historical institutionalism, rational choice institutionalism, and sociological institutionalism.’ All of these approaches developed in reaction to the behavioural perspectives that were influential during the 1960s and 1970s and all seek to elucidate the role that institutions play in the determination of social and political outcomes. However, they paint quite different pictures of the political world. In the sections that follow, we provide a brief account of the genesis of each school and characterize what is distinctive about its approach to social and political problems. We then compare their analytical strengths and weaknesses, * An earlier version of this paper WLS presented at the 1994 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association and at a Conference on ‘What is Institutionalism Now? at the
Citations
Cited by
- The Study of Critical Junctures: Theory, Narrative, and Counterfactuals in Historical Institutionalism
- Ministerial Responsiveness in Westminster Systems: Institutional Choices and House of Commons Debate, 1832–1915
- Rethinking strategic culture: A computational (social science) discursive-institutionalist approach
- Resistant to Change? The European Commission and Expert Group Reform
- Individualised Constituency Campaigns in Mixed-Member Electoral Systems: Candidates in the 2005 German Elections
- Parliamentary Staff Size Around the World
- Compared to what?: Setting American political development in comparative context
- State capacities for decarbonization: from investable transitions to green transformations
- The intelligence crisis in Iraq: political fragmentation and the challenge of reform
- How Patterns of Democracy Impact Policy Processes: When Lijphart and Sabatier Meet
- Dualisierung und Solidarität in Europas Arbeitswelt: Eine Hierarchische Perspektive
- The Cultural and Creative Industries: Organisational and Spatial Challenges to their Governance
- Measuring and Harmonising Coverage, Generosity and History of Work‐Injury Policies Globally
- Beyond Plans
- Agency, Structure and Causality in Political Science: A Comment on Sibeon
- How diverse and inclusive are policy process theories?1
- Bypassing Equity? Transit Investment and Regional Transportation Planning
- Transcending the National: QCA Insights into Multilevel Party Organization in the EU
- Where do parties talk about what? Party issue salience across communication channels
- “You can’t challenge the narrative”: Conservative-leaning New Zealanders on power, truth and politics in science
- Political science and ecological restoration
- Limits to the BRICS’ challenge: credit rating reform and institutional innovation in global finance
- Institutional foundations of financial statecraft: EU assistance to Ukraine and beyond
- How routines shape reform: the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation’s mandate to counter foreign interference
- Gendered Institutions and Where to Find Them: A Critical Realist Approach
- ‘Stop torpedoing women's rights!’: Feminist institutional responses to anti‐gender politics in Spain and Catalonia parliaments
- Journalistic Roles and the Struggle Over Institutional Identity: The Discursive Constitution of Journalism
- Institutional Violence: A Missing Link in Peace Studies
- A Research Agenda for the Study of Policy Entrepreneurs
- Getting Central and Eastern Europe Right? How Greater Academic Pluralism Would Improve Collective Knowledge-Building in Democratization Studies
- The Frenzy of Fields: An Interview with Neil Fligstein on Field-Theory and Social Skill
- Rethinking disproportionate policy making by introducing proportionate politics
- Using Post-Structuralism to Explore The Full Impact of Ideas on Politics
- Agency in historical institutionalism: Coalitional work in the creation, maintenance, and change of institutions
- Political intolerance in comprehensive welfare states: Evidence from Sweden
- Persistent informality: preparing the EU’s input into international climate negotiations
- New Institutionalism Through a Gender Lens: Towards a Feminist Institutionalism?
- Organizaciones de base e injusticia ambiental: La relevancia de las alianzas estratégicas para la incidencia en las políticas públicas. El caso de las políticas de residuos en la Región Metropolitana de Buenos Aires
- High-stakes crisis management in the Low Countries: Comparing government responses to COVID-19
- Legitimacy and context: implications for public sector reform in developing countries
- Non‐Members in a Tight Spot: How Norway Navigated Autonomy in EU Pandemic Management
- Institutional confidence, underreporting and academic consequences of gender-based violence among university staff and students in Europe
- What's the grand story? A macro‐narrative analytical model and the case of Swiss child and adult protection policy
- Institutionalism as a Methodology
- Putting path dependence in its place: toward a Taxonomy of institutional change
- Capacity‐Learning Paradox: How Hong Kong and Singapore's Crisis Responses Shape and Are Shaped by Policy Capacities
- Medienstrukturen
- Public accountability and auditing: Why and when do state auditors conduct broad audits?
- Identifying and explaining policy preferences in Swiss water management
- Options Outside Unification through Military Force
- Inside the federal machine: explaining sub-federal roles in implementing international agreements
- Power resources, institutional legacy and labour standards transformation: Lessons from two developing countries
- Political rootlessness, rather than capacity and subsystem support loss? Probing why policy derived from internationally popular norms may terminate easily
- Norms, institutions and freedom of speech in the US, the UK and Australia
- What motivates public sector organisations to use blockchain?
- Accountability in pan-European borrowing: mind the gap
- A comparative analysis of the geopolitical orientations of Belarusian elites in the aftermath of 2020 and 2022
- Academic–Military Relations in U.S. and Allied Professional Military Education Organizations, 1991–2024: A Comparative Analysis and Proposed Typology
- The Iron Cage Redux: Looking Back and Forward
- Discursive institutionalism as a research framework: result from a systematic literature review
- The scope of active labour market policies in local labour market programmes in Swedish municipalities – driven by needs or values?
- From Europeanisation to Diffusion: Introduction
- Zwischen Ökonomie und Geschichte: Ein Plädoyer für den Dialog der Politikgeschichte mit der empirisch-analytischen Politikwissenschaft
- Informal Institutions, Institutional Change, and Gender Equality
- Policy Entrepreneurship and Policy Change
- Cooperators or competitors? The interactions between WHO and the World Bank in global health governance
- Policy feedback and pathways: when change leads to endurance and continuity to change
- Gender Inequality in Social Institutions and Gendered Development Outcomes
- Why path dependence leads to a fossilized Alberta: regionalism and the climate transition in Canada
- Changing Regimes of Workplace Governance, Shifting Axes of Social Mobilization, and the Challenge to Industrial Relations Theory
- Institutions under pressure: East Asian states, global markets and national firms
- Ideas and Social Policy: An Institutionalist Perspective
- The polity of implementation: Organizational and institutional arrangements in policy implementation
- The three institutionalisms and institutional dynamics: understanding endogenous and exogenous change
- Implementação da Política Nacional de Resíduos Sólidos
- How rule directions influence actors to achieve collective action: an analysis of Dutch collective infrastructure decision-making
- Policy learning and policy failure in sustainable tourism governance: from first- and second-order to third-order change?
- Linking Jamaica’s Public Service Motivations and Ethical Climate
- Institutional translation: the art of government by translation
- Reconsidering Policy Feedback
- How people experience and change institutions: a field guide to creative syncretism
- Corruption: a situational action view
- Why didn’t the ‘critical juncture’ of the COVID-19 pandemic lead to the re-integration of public health into urban development policy in England?
- Tracing divergence in crisis governance: responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in France, Germany and Sweden compared
- Rational Choice Institutionalism
- Alien Citizens: The State and Religious Minorities in Turkey and France
- The Ottomans and Diversity
- When Do Institutions “Bite”? Historical Institutionalism and the Politics of Institutional Change
- The Theoretical Core of the New Institutionalism
- Institutionalism
- Mixed-Member Electoral Systems in Constitutional Context
- Economic Institutions and the State: Insights from Economic History
- How Institutions Evolve: Evolutionary Theory and Institutional Change
- The Transformation of Political Institutions: Investments in Institutional Resources and Gradual Change in the National Party Committees
- Institutional inertia and climate change: a review of the new institutionalist literature
- Cooperação e Coordenação na Implementação de Políticas Públicas: O Caso da Saúde
- The crisis of neoliberalism and the future of international institutions: A comparison of the IMF and the WTO
- A Nation of Organizers: The Institutional Origins of Civic Voluntarism in the United States
- The Shadow Cabinet in Westminster Systems: Modeling Opposition Agenda Setting in the House of Commons, 1832–1915
- Manufacturing Parties
- HISTORICAL INSTITUTIONALISM IN COMPARATIVE POLITICS
- The Origins of Dominant Parties: Building Authoritarian Institutions in Post-Soviet Russia
- Institutional analysis and the role of ideas in political economy
- The Institutional Design of Executive Formation in Northern Ireland
- Why are there so many hospital beds in Germany?
- A multivalent conception of path dependence: The case of transport planning in metropolitan Melbourne, Australia
- Candidate gender quotas: A framework for analysis
- Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Persistence of American Postwar Order
- THEORIZING THE EUROPEAN UNION: International Organization, Domestic Polity, or Experiment in New Governance?
- Mixed-Member Electoral Systems in Constitutional Context
- The Causes of Populism in the West
- Regimes and cultures of social security: Comparing institutional models through nonlinear PCA
- Positive Returns and Equilibrium: Simultaneous Feedback Between Public Opinion and Social Policy
- Process Sequencing Policy Dynamics: Beyond Homeostasis and Path Dependency
- Taking ideas and discourse seriously: explaining change through discursive institutionalism as the fourth ‘new institutionalism’
- Playing it forward: Path dependency, progressive incrementalism, and the "Super Wicked" problem of global climate change
- The Pragma-Dialectical Theory of Argumentation
- When the Export of Social Problems is No Longer Possible: Immigration Policies and Unemployment in Switzerland
- Globalization and International Student Mobility: A Network Analysis
- From goulash communism to goulash populism: the unwanted legacy of Hungarian reform socialism
- New institutionalism [wikipedia]
- Sensitizing events as trigger for discursive renewal and institutional change in Flanders' environmental health approach, 1970s-1990s. [europepmc]
- 'Including health in systems responsible for urban planning': a realist policy analysis research programme. [europepmc]
- Re-thinking barriers to organizational change in public hospitals. [europepmc]
- Two logics of policy intervention in immigrant integration: an institutionalist framework based on capabilities and aspirations. [europepmc]
- Governing with nature: a European perspective on putting rewilding principles into practice. [europepmc]
- The undebated issue of justice: silent discourses in Dutch flood risk management. [europepmc]
- Understanding the conditions that influence the roles of midwives in Ontario, Canada's health system: an embedded single-case study. [europepmc]
- Stakeholders' engagement in co-producing policy-relevant knowledge to facilitate employment for persons with developmental disabilities. [europepmc]
- Health system determinants of access to essential medicines for children with cancer in Ghana. [europepmc]
- Advancing a health equity agenda across multiple policy domains: a qualitative policy analysis of social, trade and welfare policy. [europepmc]
- Planned Retirement Timing in Europe: Are Europeans Adapting to the Policy of Extending Working Lives. [europepmc]
- Integrated Care's New Protagonist: The Expanding Role of Digital Health. [europepmc]
- 'Writing budgets for meetings and teas?': a multitheoretical analysis of intragovernmental coordination for multisectoral action for health in Uganda. [europepmc]
- Sharing the effort of the European Green Deal among countries. [europepmc]
- Biodefense and emergency use authorization: different originations, purposes, and evolutionary paths of institutions in the United States and South Korea. [europepmc]
- Public health advocacy strategies to influence policy agendas: lessons from a narrative review of success in trade policy. [europepmc]
- Health Policy Analysis Requires Attending to Institutions Comment on "Modelling the Health Policy Process: One Size Fits All or Horses for Courses?" [europepmc]
- Politics without society: explaining the rise of the Scottish National Party. [europepmc]
- "Leading through Crisis": A Systematic Review of Institutional Decision-Makers in Emergency Contexts. [europepmc]
- Policy analysis in sport: a review of mainstream meso-level frameworks and developing more sustainable policy for grassroots sport. [europepmc]
- Governing for sustainable health: institutional pathways in China's sport and health policy (1949-present). [europepmc]
- The evolution of traditional Chinese medicine education policies in China: themes, characteristics, and experiences-a historical institutionalism analysis based on 197 policy texts. [europepmc]
- Democratic governance through DAO-based deliberation and voting for inclusive decision making in AI models. [europepmc]
- Historical institutionalism and policy coordination: origins of the European semester [europepmc]
- Power Relations Governing Affordable Housing Communities Before and During the Covid-19 Pandemic: The Case of Shanghai, China [europepmc]
Related