Power,Idea And Institutions

Institutional change is an important phenomenon in human society,and its causal logic puzzles politicians and scholars.New institutionalism in politics has focused on the constraint on behavior and the influence on result of institution for a long time,while neglecting the change of institution itself.However,with various genres’ introspection,institutional change becomes an emerging issue and is entering the mainstream agenda of new institutionalism.The relevant case studies and meso theories have been increasing gradually.This article attempts to examine systematically the research on institutional change of new institutionalism in politics,so as to grasp all the faces of new institutionalism,understand institutional change in political field deeply,and provide some reference for promoting or preventing certain type of institutional change.Some basic questions must be dealt with when new institutionalists research on institutional change,that is,the concepts,presupposition and analysis dimension of institutional change.First,institution is a being which provides stable expectation and structures social interaction.Any object with this property can be included in the category of institution.Institution is seen as regulation,norm or cognition in essence,and different ontology means different mechanism through which it influences behavior.As a deviation from existing trajectory,institutional change may manifest itself in some degree of change of the form,enforcement,function and so on.There are two types of institutional change: the intentional one and the decentralized one.The former goes through a formal decision-making process while the latter not.Second,institutional change can’t happen without actors.Early hypothesis about actors in every genre limited their research on institutional change to varying extent.But subsequent supplement and amendment begins to stress actors’ embedded agency,bounded rationality,strategic and reflective nature.Ultimately,new institutionalists reveal the causal logic of institutional change in two dimensions: its driving force and dynamic process.The initial driving force of institutional change comes from the environment,actors or existing institution.New institutionalists always put them in the framework of exogenous and endogenous change,or demand and supply.On the one hand,exogenous change reflects the interaction between institution and environment.The change of environment exerts pressure on the effectiveness and legitimacy of institution.Endogenous change reflects the interaction between institution and actors.The conflict between different institutional elements,the ambiguity of institution,the imperfection of institution’s enforcement,the self-undermining of institution and other factors or processes sow the seed of institutional change.On the other hand,actors may have incentive for institutional change and promote a demand-led change because of institution’s deficiency,its incapacity to satisfy their interest or other reasons.Potential new institution may be offered in advance due to institutional template elsewhere or progress of knowledge,and promote a supply-led institutional change by stimulating demand.However,institution suffers from not only pressure for change,but also resistance to change.Specifically speaking,information processing and distribution of attention restricts the recognition and attribution of problem;risk preference,collective action problems,power asymmetry and other factors affect the cost-benefit calculation,intensifying institution’s inertia actually.In this context,various forms of driving force must meet certain requirement to make institutional change enter formal agenda or happen in a decentralized manner.The requirement can be critical juncture created by crisis or big event,problem construction completed by taking advantage of political opportunity,or threshold reached by slow accumulation.The process of institutional change is affected by power,idea,other institutions and their interaction.Although different genres pay attention to power or idea one after the other,and materialists and constructivists in new institutionalism give divergent weight to them and emphasize their complementarity or competitiveness,the roles of power and idea in institutional change are taken seriously.First,power as domination is based on resource and resource mobilization ability,which gives rise to the variability of power relations and the possibility of institutional change.According to the pattern of power relations,there are two kinds of intentional institutional change: when overwhelming power is absent,the process of change is filled with power struggle between competitive alliances.The veto points become main arena of struggle,whose outcome is determined by the building of alliance and the alliance politics.When overwhelming power is present,intentional change is exactly reform carried out by it.It is the design,enforcement and legitimation of new scheme that influences the reform results.In terms of decentralized institutional change,formal institution and informal institution has different mechanism: formal institution may change through displacement,layering,drift or conversion.Which of them would occur depends on veto power and discretion in interpretation or enforcement.The evolution of informal institution is affected by asymmetrical resource and power,which influences the credibility of commitment and the diffusion of credible commitment.Second,cognitive and normative ideas play roles in the struggle over institution or policy.They are used as blueprints for new institution or strategic weapons,and impact the effectiveness or legitimacy of alternative programs.In intentional institutional change,the failure of dominant idea creates demand for new idea,and then alternative ideas emerge and compete with each other.Which one will win depends on the transmission of ideas via discourse and framing,and their interaction with power struggle and institutional environment.As for decentralized institutional change,subjective game theory and theory of evolution takes notice of idea.The former emphasizes cognitive crisis and collaborative correction of subjective game models;the latter emphasizes the function of cognition in institution’s mutation,selection and replication.Besides,the relationship among institutions is also an influence factor of institutional change.For instance,different types of informal institution and relevant formal institution interplay,affecting the impetus,schema and result of each other’s change.Complementary institutions with distinct generative logic mean different things in institutional maintain or change.Institution in other levels may influence the given level of institutional change by constraining available resource and strategy.Despite significant progress above,research on institutional change of new institutionalism faces some challenges.Early research on institution’s influence and constraint made traditional explanations of path dependence,and was partial to structure or agency,hampering research on institutional change.But some new institutionalists have integrated path dependence and institutional change by distinguishing institution and institution’s element,underlining path node and agency in the node,and seeking for alternative sequence to self-reinforcement.Meanwhile,some feasible approaches to integrate structure and agency have arisen in social science and gotten new institutionalists’ attention or application,such as the theory of structuration and hierarchical ontology.So to speak,the future of research on institutional change of new institutionalism is profoundly related to the integration between path dependence and institutional change,and between structure and agency.