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Crisis, Choice, and Change in Retrospect

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Gabriel A. Almond ,
Scott C. Flanagan  and
Robert J. Mundt
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Extract

THE ‘NEW INSTITUTIONALISM’ HAS BEEN THE MOST VISIBLE movement in American political science during the last decade. It is a recoil from reductionism that is said to have dominated the political science of the previous decades. During the American Political Science Association presidency of Charles E. Lindblom in 1981, with Theodore Lowi and Sidney Tarrow as co-chairs of the Program Committee, it was decided that all titles of panels and round tables at the annual meeting were to have ‘and the state’ tacked on. The implication was that the behavioural revolution had resulted in the neglect of the power and autonomy of the state. But this adding on ‘and the state’ had very little effect on the content of the papers, and seemed primarily to have ‘buzzword’ significance. A second manifestation of this discomfort was an article in the American Political Science Review of 1984 by James March and Johan Olsen, entitled ‘The New Institutionalism; The Organizational Factor in Political Life’, followed by a book by the same two authors called Rediscovering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics.

Type
Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 27 , Issue 3 , 01 July 1992 , pp. 345 - 367
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1992

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References

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One approach typical or the efforts during this period to introduce ideological considerations into the minimal winning coalition model was to position the contenders on one fixed ideological or left‐right policy continuum and add in the assumption that only contiguous contenders could form coalitions, meaning that no coalitions were possible which skipped over one or more actors within their ideological range.

19 One potentially winning coalition dominates another if all the members of the first prefer it to the second. This concept of dominance was used with the member utilities to develop a procedure for identifying the predicted coalition outcome(s).

20 In Bruce Bueno de Mesquita. David Kewman and Alvin Rabushka, Forecasting Political Events: Hong Kong's Future, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1985, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita reports finding extremely high levels of inter‐coder reliability in country expert estimates for the three bits of information needed to operate his expected utility model‐issue positions, issue salience and power.

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22 Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, ‘Forecasting Policy Decisions: An Expected Utility Approach to Post‐Khorneini Iran’, PS, Vol. 17, Spring 1984, pp. 26–36; Bruce Bueno de Mesquita in Bueno de Mesquita, Newman and Rabushka, op. cit.