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This chapter examines the leading present-day expression of modernist-empiricism: the new institutionalism. First, it challenges the belief of new institutionalists that they have a shared new paradigm. Instead, we suggest it is varied, containing strands that can scarcely be reconciled with one another. Second, it argues that historical institutionalism exists primarily as a counter to rational choice institutionalism but its inductive, modernist-empiricist logic lacks a micro-level theory for explaining historical change and awareness grows that it is not a distinctive approach. Third, it argues that ideational or constructivist institutionalism offers a promising way forward provided it develops a micro-theory that appeals to the beliefs and desires of actors and it breaks with the ahistorical forms of explanation of modernist-empiricism.

This chapter presents theories of institutional change. It begins with a discussion of the definition of institutions. It then discusses the concepts of institutional change, rational choice institutionalism, and distributional rational choice institutionalism.

Reviews the new institutionalist literature on institution-building and derives expectations based on rational choice and sociological institutionalism for explaining the empowerment of the European Parliament. Since concerns about ‘democratic legitimacy’ are cited frequently in the literature on European integration as ad hoc-explanations for the empowerment of the European Parliament, this chapter will also turn to work on the ‘democratic deficit’ and inquire whether this literature offers any cues to improve our understanding of the existence and empowerment of the European Parliament.

This chapter discusses existing hypotheses about the reasons for the introduction of state funding to political parties and links them to one of the main new institutionalist approaches. From a rational choice perspective, state funding to political parties is a response to rising costs of political competition. However, these costs have risen in all democracies, no matter whether state funding has been introduced. From a historical institutionalist perspective, the introduction of state funding is, for instance, linked to étatiste traditions. This explanation fails to explain why, in some countries, no state funding exists despite influential étatiste traditions, or why state funding was only introduced when these traditions were actually eroding. Normative institutionalist approaches link the introduction of state funding with a specific logic of appropriateness which, for instance, prompted a perception of parties as ‘public utilities’. In order to avoid such barely falsifiable arguments, the next chapter refers to actor-based institutionalism.

Whereas Chapter 1 reviews general theories of European integration, Chapter 2 contains a review of theories of institutional change with a particular emphasis on a troika of institutionalist theories: Rational Choice Institutionalism (RCI), Historical Institutionalism (HI), and Sociological Institutionalism (SI). RCI is this book's theory of choice, essentially amounting to an assumption that institutions are fairly easy to change and an explanation that actors compete to change them when status quo institutions prevent them from achieving their preferences. The book's RCI‐based argument claims that power‐changing informal accords get created in the EU when constraints on the EU's primary political actors change, the actors being the Council of Ministers, the European Commission, and the European Parliament. It predicts that the Parliament as the weakest actor succeeds in bargaining for advantageous informal accords with its stronger counterparts when one or more of a serious of specific conditions temporarily empower it.

The conclusion addresses three areas of theoretical interest posed by empirical and theoretical arguments made in the substantive chapters of Manufacturing Possibilities. First it elaborates more precisely the ways that pragmatist notions of creative action and recomposition are superior to various forms of institutionalism (sociological, rational choice and historical institutionalism). Second it more explicitly elaborates the non-structural, relational and contextual understanding of power that undergirds the analysis of industrial change. Thirdly it points out that pragmatism involves a distinctive approach to social science : It encourages the search for interesting possibilities, rather than determinate forms of causality which tend to place undue attention on constraint. Pragmatist social science, ultimately, is science in the interest of greater democracy

Focusing on environmental policies, this chapter aims to contribute to the debate on the politics of Europeanization by presenting the conceptual and theoretical state of the art of research into this specific sector of potential European Union (EU) impact on domestic political systems. The chapter first provides some background information on the essential properties of environmental policy and on the development of EU environmental policy; this is done to explicate the defining characteristics of this sector vis-é-vis other sectors. Next, three recent comparative case studies on the determinants of national adaptation to EU environmental policy requirements are reviewed; these are theoretically informed by either sociological institutionalism or rational choice institutionalism, and arrive at different and partially competing explanations for the variation in national adaptation to European environmental policies. Despite disagreement about the relative importance of the factors and mechanisms of Europeanization, the results of the comparative case studies offer elements for a theory about the conditions of policy adaptation and, by implication, about convergence. Building upon these findings, elements are suggested for a future research agenda based on theoretically informed comparative case studies that gradually include new policy sectors and countries; in addition, the use of counterfactual arguments is proposed to isolate the causal impact of the European Union.

This chapter introduces historical institutionalism (HI) to international relations (IR). Historical institutionalism, located outside of IR’s paradigmatic debates, has been given little explicit attention within IR. We argue, however, that scholarship on international institutions is increasingly concerned with issues that HI was developed to address and that this overlap of interests is a compelling reason for IR to explicitly engage with HI. We discuss what is distinctive about HI, especially in relation to rational and sociological institutionalisms. Then, as groundwork for empirical research, we develop a systematic conceptualization of the terms “institutional development,” “stability,” and “change” by distinguishing three dimensions of change: speed, scope, and depth. Finally, we provide an overview of the empirical chapters in this volume and reflect on what status HI should have within the existing field of IR theories.

This chapter explores the European Central Bank’s (ECB) evolution as a political actor from a rational choice institutionalist perspective. It takes issue with claims that the Bank shares the same preferences for ever closer union as the traditional engines of European integration. Presenting case studies of ECB policy on the European anti-fraud agency (OLAF), the Constitutional Treaty, the Lisbon Treaty, economic policy coordination, and financial supervision, it shows that the Bank has, in many cases, resisted attempts to enhance the Community dimension of Economic and Monetary Union. This conclusion challenges the idea that supranational institutions are hardwired to support the European project and raises questions about whether this tendency might apply to other European Union institutions and agencies.

This chapter compares the provisions regarding the conference in the Party Rules across the fraternal parties of CEE and identifies that these regulations are codified very similarly, simply to provide the Party leadership with the option to call a conference between congresses. So, in the absence of formal rules, historical and discursive institutional approaches are applied to reconstruct a blueprint for the ‘informal’ rules that governed this institution on the basis of previous conference outcome. The purpose of this approach is to understand what the conference represented to actors as a policy choice in 1988, and why it was that various contingents in the party objected to a conference and instead demanded an extraordinary congress. A rational choice approach helps explain why actors structuralised their preferences in this context, as discussed in chapters 3, 5, 6 and 7.

In the theoretical chapter, different from the principal-agent literature which focuses on why principals delegate and how they seek to control the agent, this book analyzes delegation from the angle of power distribution among the involved actors, the Council, the Commission and the Parliament. The authors base their argument on institutionalist power-based bargaining theory and argue that all actors seek to establish a mode of decision-making that maximizes their institutional power. And if – dissatisfied with a formal distribution of competence distribution – they will seek to alter them through a re-bargaining of these during the application of the rules. The focus rests in particular on the rising power of the Parliament. The chapter shows how the Parliament has changed the parameters of the contest for power, thereby transforming the governance of comitology over the years.