FROM HISTORICAL INSTITUTIONALISM TO DISCURSIVE INSTITUTIONALISM EXPLAINING CHANCE

FROM HISTORICAL INSTITUTIONALISM TO DISCURSIVE INSTITUTIONALISM: EXPLAINING CHANCE IN COMPARATIVE POLITICAL ECONOMY Vivien A. Schmidt Seminaroplæg 070109 Gunnar Scott Reinbacher

åbning • Artiklen, de to artikler • Hovedspørgsmålet handler om at kunne forklare forandring, udvikling og dynamik – EU dynamikker • Aktualiseringsramme – Equilibrium (Parssons) – Evolution – Dynamisk forandring – revolution

introduction historical institutionalism, whic much better at explaining institutional continuity or describing institutional evolution rather than at explaining institutional change. such approaches still do more to describe what changes occur than to explain why change occurs. Det exogene

introduction Discursive institutionalism is the term I use for all methodological approaches that take ideas and discourse seriously, by focusing on the substantive content of ideas and/or on the Interactive processes that serve to generate those ideas and commumcate them to the public det endogene

introduction discursive institutionalism offers insights into why political economic institutions change (or continue) by zooming in not only on sentient agents’ cognitive and normative ideas about what they were doing and why at different levels of generality—policy, program, and philosophy— but also on their discursive interactions regarding who spoke to whom where, when and why in the process of generating those ideas in a ’coordinative discourse’ of policy construction and in articulating them in a ’communicative’ discourse of public deliberation and legitimization.

introduction • Paperet ser både en modstilling mellem HI og DI, men også, at de kan komplementere hinanden • Paperet er kritisk over for HI, men i denne senere artikel også kritisk over for begrænsningerne i DI

Forandringsforklaring i HI Historical institutionalism focuses on institutions. Institutions åre conceptualized as structures external to political economic actors, constraining them through the historical paths that shape their actions. Such actors åre not agents as such, but rather formalized as corporate actors like unions, business, bureaucracy, politicians, and so forth. There åre no individuals per se here either, and where corporate actors åre seen to have motivations, these åre mostly rational choice-derived assumptions that they act in certain ways to maximize their interests, and that such motivations drive their interactions.

HI • Problemer med at forklare forandring – Mere statisk – Mangler forandringsagenter – Forandring sker blot – I relation til ydre og ikke indre processer – Kan ikke forklare kapitalismens udvikling over tid

HI the result is a doubly equilibrium-focused approach to the varieties of capitalism in which coordination and complementarity in capitalist systems admit of little change other than positive feedbacks effects while the system’s homeostatic equilibrium ensures that changing any one component leads to adjustments in the other components, but no real transformation of the system as a whole or even evolution except at moments of punctuated equilibrium.

EXPLAINING CHANCE IN DISCURSi. VE INSTITUTIONALISM diskursive institutionalisme ser indad på aktører, udsagn, ideer. timing of change policy ideas (forandrer sig hurtigt) programmatiske ideer (varer længere) (Kuhn) philosophical ideas (langsomst i forandring) (idealtyper, Weber, den protestantiske etik. . )

DI • Policy ideas, we still don`t know how they change, foreground • Programmatic, the same problem • Philosophical ideas, bigger problem, remain deep in background

DI • Content of change – RI ideer adskilt fra interesser – SI endogene såvel som exogene faktorer – DI lidt som SI men mere dynamiske omkring interesser og ideer • Kognitive ideer, interest based logic • Normative ideas, basic principles og values Svarer noget til Weber, formåls og værdirationalitet

DI • Agents of change Ideas do not ’float freely’ Carriers of ideas who articulate them Focusing on the agents of change is importent

Discursive dynamics of change Discourse encompasses not only the representation of ideas, or ’what is said’ in all its levels, types, as well as forms— including narratives, myths, frames, collective memories, stories, scripts, scenarios, images, and more. It also refers to ’who said what to whom where and why, ’ or the Interactive processes by which those ideas åre constructed and communicated.

Discursive dynamics of change • The interactive dimention • The coordinative discourse among policy actors • communication • The arrows of discursive interaction, different directions • (problemer med guidelines)

Discursive institutionel context • Text in particular meaning context – Logic of communication – Foreground discursive abilities through which agents may change their institutions, svarer til Habermas kommunikativ handlen. Gramsci tages ind her, men han er nu klasseorienteret

Historical institutional context Historical institutionalism, by contrast to DI, explains change from the outside, by taking those courses of action and seeing how they play out over time. But it can nevertheless prove complementary to discursive institutionalist explanation, by showing how formal institutions shape discursive interactions.

THE LIMITS OF Dl. SCURSIVE INSTITUTIONALIST EXPLANATIONS OF CHANCE • Intenderer ikke at forklare al forandring indefra • Forklarer forandring over tid gennem agenternes produktion af ideer og regler • Anerkender i en vis forstand det materielle og interesserne • Interessebaseret ideer • Puzzling and powering • Kompleks relation mellem power, position, ideas • Bliver problematisk omkring ”causal influence”

DI – HI • RI – DI SI

conclusion We åre left with one final question: what is the value-added of approaches that take ideas and discourse seriously? Discursive institutionalism endogenizes change, explaimng much of how and why public actors bring about institutional change, thereby reinjecting agency into historical institutionalism.

spørgsmål • De fire instutionalismer og deres indre sammenhæng • Betydningen af proces metoder • Causal influence • Guidelines for HI og DI upræcis – Om at bruge DI i praksis • Kan adaptiv tilgang hjælpe • Kompleksiteten forurener • Foucault, Marx, Weber, SI, Gramsci,

spørgsmål • SI – Philosophically – Equilibrium/strukturfunktionalisme (Parssons) – Systemteori/kybernetik (Buckley) – Ideologiske statsapparater (Althusser, tidlig Foucault, tidlig Habermas (erkentniss und interesse) – Aktør/struktur teoretikere, modernitetens sociologer – Makrosociologi, Marxisme – Kritisk realisme – Foucault