A more personal book

This is a book about political analysis, and in particular institutional analysis. It is not primarily a book about the EU, even if European developments play an important role in the book.

This is an empirical-analytical book concerned with how politics and government work in practice, and not a normative book about how politics and government should work in the best of all worlds.

A personal book

This is a book assuming that there are things we can see in non-settled polities and in transformative periods which we can not easily see in more settled polities and ‘normal’ periods. In the latter situations much attention is concentrated on how institutions impact substantive policy-making, effectiveness and efficiency. In the former situations there is more focus upon how political institutions affect the possibility of political community and civilized co-existence, organized rule, orderly change, unity in diversity, the ability to live with unsolved conflict and ‘standing antagonisms’, as well as political language and normative standards.

This is a book that in many ways is personal: it is an attempt to understand not only what is happening in political science and institutional analysis, but also an attempt to understand what I have been doing over the last 40 years and what I am doing now. That is, it is part of my continuous efforts to use organization theory to make sense of political institutions: how they emerge, are maintained and change, and what difference they make.

A reaction

When I started my studies in 1963, a ‘revolution’ was taking place in Norwegian political science – away from the discipline’s basis in law, history and political philosophy/history of ideas, and towards a discipline primarily rooted in American behavioral science, with Dahl, Lipset, Easton, Deutsch and others as the ‘stars’.

The US-led behavioral revolution was to a considerable degree directed towards what Easton called a typical European way of looking at politics (Easton 1964: 154). ‘Institutionalism’ was used as a negative term and formal-legal approaches to institutions were portrayed as excessively formalistic. A central claim in 1955 was that:

'With noteworthy exceptions the study of continental European political institutions still tends to be dominated by this historical, philosophical, and legal emphasis' … 'And with all the refinements of European legal scholarship, the richness of the European historical tradition, and its philosophical and theoretical sophistication, that branch of the political science discipline which deals with continental European government and politics has not been able to escape a certain alienation from reality which always results from too great an emphasis on the formal aspects of institutions and processes' (Almond, Cole and Macridis [1955], 1963: 53).

There was a reaction against the tendency to emphasize the legal basis of governmental institutions and law as the primary instrument of governing. That is, to use the legal Constitution as a proxy for political order and legal organization as a proxy for political organization, rather than a behavioral, theory based analysis of how political institutions are organized, how they work, and what effects they have in practice.

However, and as you know well, later there has been a new legalism and a renewed interest in legal rules, historical developments and path-dependencies, and normative theories that claim to say something about ‘good government’. The book is also a revisiting of ‘the typical European way’, which is neither dead nor dying, yet without regressing to excessive formalism.

The key concept

Let me emphasize that the concept of ‘institution’ is key to understanding the book:

As a study object: political science has ‘always’ studied what is called ‘institutions’ in every-day language.

Analytically, institutionalism, as I use it in the book refers to a formally organized set of socially validated rules and practices prescribing appropriate or exemplary behavior, embedded in a structure of meaning (which explains and justifies the prescribed behavioral rules and practices), and a structure of resources (making it more or less possible for actors to follow rules of appropriate or exemplary behavior).

This conception is the key to understanding what this book is about.

Four parts

The book I divided in four parts:

First, there is a brief introduction to the democratic vision of a demos able to organize and govern itself politically and improving their lives through institutional design and reform.

Secondly, there is a nearly hundred page long essay on what students of political institutions, and political science in general, can learn from the grand experiment in institution building and polity formation going on in Europe. The starting point for this essay was the claim that our concepts and theoretical ideas, derived from studies of the territorial nation state are outdated and not useful for understanding processes transcending the state. The book challenges this assumption. Furthermore, the essay is an attempt to return to some older European ideas and what Weber in 1904 called Wirklichkeitswissenschaft. In other words, this represents an effort to go back to the fundamentals of political analysis and some old and enduring debates in Europe. Ten lessons for institutional analysis, which I will not repeat here, are suggested.

The third part deals in more detail with conceptions of what I have called ‘three unifying controversies in the study of political organization’: the tensions between change and continuity, between central authority and institutional autonomy, and the tensions between majoritarian and non-majoritarian institutions, illustrated by the bureaucracy, often seen as both a democratic threat and a necessity.

Fourth, there is a short epilogue on political science conceived of as an architectonic discipline or an academic Carrefour, an intersection for a variety of other disciplines that also have something to say about politics, governing and political institutions.

I am now curious about what kind of things my good colleagues Ulf and Daniel have seen in the book.

Read Ulf Sverdrup's comment here.

Read Daniel Gaus' comment here.

By Johan P. Olsen