Political Institutions and Social Power: Some Conceptual Explorations

Abstract

Goodin (1996) has proposed a convenient tripartite scheme of dynamic mechanisms which drive institutional change: accidents, evolution, intentions. If we look at trends in the analytical perspectives of political scientists, the latter of these three forces, intentionality, have not fared well, be it as the key explanatory variable of institutional change that has actually occurred, be it as the moving force of prospective choices and changes that are deemed to be desirable or even „necessary“. As Helmut Wiesenthal (1995, 2002) has reminded us, the thrust of the theoretical tradition of the social choice, public choice, implementation research, „muddling through“ and bounded rationality theorems, as well as neo institutionalist and joint decision-making approaches all focus on the obstacles to and the pervasive improbability of major institutional innovations being the result of a widely agreed-upon intentional design of actors, be it elites or nonelites. Yet, interestingly, there seem to be counter-examples of what Wiesenthal has termed „holistic“ reforms, where some basic and comprehensive innovation of the social, political, and economic order of entire societies (equivalent to what is termed a political „paradigm shift“, following Hall (1986)) has actually taken place.