Ideas, Institutions, and Political Order: Explaining Political Change

Institutional approaches to explaining political phenomena suffer from three common limitations: reductionism, reliance on exogenous factors, and excessive emphasis on order and structure. Ideational approaches to political explanation, while often more sensitive to change and agency, largely exhibit the same shortcomings. In particular, both perspectives share an emphasis on discerning and explaining patterns of ordered regularity in politics, making it hard to explain important episodes of political change. Relaxing this emphasis on order and viewing politics as situated in multiple and not necessarily equilibrated order suggests a way of synthesizing institutional and ideational approaches and developing more convincing accounts of political change. In this view, change arises out of “friction” among mismatched institutional and ideational patterns. An account of American civil rights policy in the 1960s and 1970s, which is not amenable to either straightforward institutional or ideational explanation, demonstrates the advantages of the approach.