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-
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