European Policy Analysis Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2016 | Page 129

European Policy Analysis Coleman 1992). More skeptical of seeing such associations as durable groupings, Heclo (1978), in an American context, thought that they were more like open and flexible “issue networks” where participants could opt in or out as they saw fit. On a second level, typical actor associations were theorized as characteristic for entire patterns of governing. Schmitter and Lehmbruch (1979), in a European context, labeled stable configurations of policy actors from government, business, and trade unions as “corporatism”; though in the United States it was more likely to be an interest in “urban regimes” (Dowding 2001). Others saw the emergence of a new paradigm for the “architecture of complexity” in the gradual erosion of “government” by authoritative direction and rise of “governance” by negotiation between self-organizing networks (Rhodes 1997). A third level of theorizing the policy process as stabilizing association and practice through functional linkage is the application of institutional theories. Asking how institutions and rules matter for policymaking, these frameworks see interactions between policy actors as becoming stabilized through routines, habitual behavior, mutual recognition, labeling, and becoming “infused with value”(Selznick 1957, 17)—in other words, becoming institutionalized. Generally, institutional theories are said to explain long-term stability well, but not change. Three “new institutionalisms” are identified in the literature—historical (Streeck and Thelen 2005), economic (Ostrom 2009), and sociological (March and Olsen 1989)—each tending to generalize from favorite examples and paradigms of explanation within their own originating disciplines—respectively, the logic of historical paths, the economic logic of interest-based calculation, and the social logic of appropriate behavior— and recently “discursive institutionalism” was added to the list (Schmidt 2008). All institutionalists except for those who strongly advocate macroviews of modernization, prefer nonteleological ways of thinking. They ei ther use the inductive methods of historical narrative in an eventful temporality in which policymaking processes are considered contingent, open-ended, and noncontinuous by definition. Occasionally, particular events, with the benefit of hindsight, can be assigned the status of origins of significant or pervasive changes in policymaking structures like networks or entire styles of policymaking. Alternatively, positivistically inclined institutionalists search for law-like sequences or causal mechanisms in policymaking processes by resorting to comparative explanation, in an experimental temporality where a small number of supposedly independent and equivalent cases is used to discover or test hypotheses inspired by (middlerange) social science theories (Sewell 2005, 81–123). On the other hand, there are theories that see collective policy action arising through a more Hobbesian or Schmittian view of “Realpolitik”, or a Mouffian view of inevitable agonistic competition and rivalry in politics (Mouffe 2000), that posit a logic of pure power domination or a Gramscian political strategy for hegemony (Gramsci 1971) as the big drivers behind public policy processes. Such theories argue that acting in concert requires power-over as instrumental to power-to and power- 129