Constructivist Institutionalism: Or, Why Interests into Ideas Don't Go.

The proliferation of new institutionalist scholarship has, perhaps unremarkably, led to a corresponding proliferation in the adjectives used to characterise its variants. In 1984 James G. March and Johan P. Olsen spoke quite comfortably of the new institutionalism in the singular. By 1996 Peter A. Hall and Rosemary Taylor eventually settled on three new institutionalisms (having toyed, in earlier iterations of the same now classic article, with four). And by 1998 B. Guy Peters identified no less than seven new institutionalisms. Yet none of these authors made any reference to constructivism, far less to a distinctive constructivist variant of institutionalism in its own right. Indeed, until recently, there has been little if any reference to what is now variously described as an ideational, discursive or, as here, constructivist institutionalism. This is for three good reasons - constructivist institutionalism is by far the most recent addition to the family of institutionalisms, it arises out of an engagement with the limitations of the others, and, as a consequence and in contrast the others, it is still very much in its inception. It is, nonetheless already highly distinctive (ontologically, analytically and methodologically), and it poses a series of challenges to extant institutionalisms. The aim of this paper is quite simple - to outline the distinctiveness of constructivist institutionalism, to identify the nature of the challenge that it poses, and to discuss the problematic treatment of the concept of interests in constructivist institutionalist research to date. The paper proceeds in three sections. In the first, I consider the origins of constructivist institutionalism in the attempt to grapple with the limits of pre-existing institutionalist scholarship to deal with post-formative institutional change, particularly that associated with disequilibrium dynamics. In the second, I consider the ontological and analytical distinctiveness of constructivist institutionalism's turn to ideas and the associated nature of the challenge its poses to existing neo-institutionalist perspectives. In the third and concluding section, I establish the tendency of constructivist institutionalist research to fall back on an essentially materialist conception of self-interest, documenting the potential pitfalls of such a move. I argue that a more consistently constructivist perspective, which sees interests as social constructions, rather than as materially-given is in fact far better placed than any other variant of the new institutionalism to provide insights into the determinants of the rapid institutional and ideational change that other perspectives tend merely to endogenise. I illustrate this by showing how such a perspective might deal, rather differently than existing work, with the origins and rise of monetarism. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]