Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-fscjk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-24T01:31:58.319Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A Curious Constructivism: A Response to Professor Bell

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 February 2012

Vivien A. Schmidt
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Image of the first page of this content. For PDF version, please use the ‘Save PDF’ preceeding this image.'
Type
Notes and Comments
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 42 , Issue 3 , 01 June 2012 , pp. 705 - 713
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Schmidt, Vivien, ‘Taking Ideas and Discourse Seriously: Explaining Change through Discursive Institutionalism as the Fourth “New Institutionalism” ’, European Political Science Review, 2 (2010), 1–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hay, Colin, ‘Ideas, Interests and Institutions in the Comparative Political Economy of Great Transformations’, Review of International Political Economy, 11 (2004), 204–226CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Blyth, Mark, Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Bell, ‘Do We Really Need a New “Constructivist Institutionalism?” ’, British Journal of Political Science, 41 (2011), 883–906CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 884.

3 Bell, ‘Do We Really Need’, p. 886Google Scholar.

4 Bell, ‘Do We Really Need’, p. 889Google Scholar, fn. 48.

5 Bell, ‘Do We Really Need’, p. 887Google Scholar.

6 Bell, ‘Do We Really Need’, p. 888Google Scholar.

7 What is contradictory, as we shall see below, is that institutions are both constraining and enabling of action.

8 Bell, ‘Do We Really Need’, p. 889Google Scholar.

9 See various works by Mark Blyth: Great Transformations; ‘Structures Do Not Come with an Instruction Sheet: Interests, Ideas and Progress in Political Science’, Perspectives on Politics, 1 (2003), 695–703Google Scholar; ‘When Liberalisms Change: Comparing the Politics of Deflations and Inflations’, in Denzau, Arthur T., Willett, Thomas C. and Roy, Ravi K., eds, Neoliberalism, National and Regional Experiments with Global Ideas (London: Routledge, 2006)Google Scholar, 71–96; ‘Constructing the International Economy’, in Abdelal, Rawi, Blyth, Mark and Parsons, Craig, eds, Constructing the International Economy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2010)Google Scholar, 1–20; ‘Ideas, Uncertainty and Evolution’, in Cox, Robert and Beland, Daniel, eds, Ideas and Politics in Social Science Research (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)Google Scholar, pp. 83–101.

10 Bell, ‘Do We Really Need’, p. 888Google Scholar.

11 Blyth, Great Transformations, pp. 41Google Scholar.

12 Bell, ‘Do We Really Need’, p. 888Google Scholar.

13 Bell, ‘Do We Really Need’, p. 887Google Scholar.

14 Blyth, Great Transformations, p. 171Google Scholar.

15 For a similar argument, see Abdelal, Rawi, Capital Rules: The Construction of Global Finance (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

16 Bell, ‘Do We Really Need’, pp. 886–887Google Scholar.

17 Bell, ‘Do We Really Need’, p. 889Google Scholar (my emphases).

18 See, for example, various works by Vivien A. Schmidt: ‘Values and Discourse in the Politics of Adjustment’, in Scharpf, F. W. and Schmidt, V. A., eds, Welfare and Work in the Open Economy, Vol. I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar, pp. 229–309; The Futures of European Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); ‘Does Discourse Matter in the Politics of Welfare State Adjustment?’ Comparative Political Studies, 35, no. 2 (2002), 168–93; ‘How, Where, and When does Discourse Matter in Small States’ Welfare State Adjustment?’ New Political Economy, 8 (2003), 127–46; ‘The Role of Public Discourse for a Social Democratic Reform Project’, in Vivien A. Schmidt et al., Public Discourse and Welfare State Reform: The Social Democratic Experience (Amsterdam: Mets & Schilt, 2005)Google Scholar, 13–50; The EU and National Polities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); ‘Trapped by their Ideas: French Elites’ Discourses of European Integration and Globalization’, Journal of European Public Policy, 14 (2007), 992–1009; ‘Putting the Political Back into Political Economy by Bringing the State Back Yet Again’, World Politics, 61 (2009), 516–48.

19 These include the work of Hay, Blyth, the few early historical institutionalists who strongly stress ideas named by Bell, such as Margaret Weir, Victoria Hattam, Desmond King, the early work of Peter A. Hall, Robert Lieberman, and latterly, John Campbell. Note that Campbell has called his work ‘discursive institutionalist’ and that his book published in 2004, Institutional Change and Globalization (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press), which Bell uses to critique Blyth, is actually extremely lauditory regarding Blyth's work.

20 As in ‘advocacy coalitions’ (Sabatier), ‘epistemic communities’ (Haas), and ‘norm entrepreneurs’ (Finnemore and Sikkink).

21 As in ‘communicative action’ (Habermas), ‘deliberative democracy’ (Dryzek), ‘mass publics’ (Zaller), ‘political persuasion’ (Mutz), or ‘public debates’ (Art).

22 E.g., Vivien A. Schmidt, ‘Institutionalism and the State’, in Hay, Colin, Marsh, David and Lister, Michael, eds, The State: Theories and Issues (Basingstoke, Hants.: Palgrave, 2005)Google Scholar, pp. 98-117; and ‘Discursive Institutionalism: The Explanatory Power of Ideas and Discourse’, Annual Review of Political Science, 11 (2008), 303–26.

23 Searle, John, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Habermas, Jürgen, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory (London: Polity Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

24 For example, Schmidt: The Futures of European Capitalism, Democracy in Europe, and ‘Putting the Political Back’.

25 Schmidt, Vivien A. and Radaelli, Claudio, ‘Conceptual and Methodological Issues in Policy Change in Europe’, West European Politics, 27, no. 2 (2004), 1–28Google Scholar; Schmidt, The Futures of European Capitalism, chap. 2.

26 Mahoney, James and Thelen, Kathleen, Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency, and Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tsai, Kellee S., Capitalism Without Democracy; The Private Sector in Contemporary China (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Wolfgang Streeck and Kathleen Thelen, ‘Introduction: Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies’, in Streeck, Wolfgang and Thelen, Kathleen, eds, Beyond Continuity: Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)Google Scholar, pp. 1–39; Campbell, Institutional Change and Globalization.

27 Schmidt, ‘Discursive Institutionalism’; and ‘Taking Ideas and Discourse Seriously’; Streeck and Thelen, Beyond Continuity.

28 E.g., Mahony and Thelen, Explaining Institutional Change.

29 Which is what Bell does in his own case study. On the specific problems of historical institutionalism, see Vivien A. Schmidt, ‘Analyzing Ideas and Tracing Discursive Interactions in Institutional Change: From Historical Institutionalism to Discursive Institutionalism’, Harvard Center for European Studies, CES Papers, Open Forum, No. 3 (2011).

30 Bell, ‘Do We Really Need’, p. 893Google Scholar.

31 Bell, ‘Do We Really Need’, p. 894Google Scholar.

32 Bell, ‘Do We Really Need’, p. 895Google Scholar.

33 Bell, ‘Do We Really Need’, p. 897Google Scholar.

34 Bell, ‘Do We Really Need’, pp. 897–8Google Scholar.

35 Bell, ‘Do We Really Need’, p. 899Google Scholar.

36 Bell, ‘Do We Really Need’, p. 900Google Scholar, quoting Margaret Archer, ‘For Structure: Its Reality, Properties and Powers: A Reply to Anthony King’, Sociological Review, 48 (2000), 464–72, p. 465.

37 Giddens, Anthony, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 Hollis, Martin and Smith, Steven, Explaining and Understanding in International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

39 Bell, ‘Do We Really Need’, p. 893Google Scholar.

40 Jones, Bryan D., Baumgartner, Frank R., Breunig, Christian, Wlezien, Christopher, Soroka, Stuart, Foucault, Martial, François, Abel, Green-Pedersen, Christoffer, Koski, Chris, John, Peter, Mortensen, Peter B.Varone, Frédéric and Walgrave, Stefaan, ‘A General Empirical Law of Public Budgets: A Comparative Analysis’, American Journal of Political Science, 53 (2009), 855–873CrossRefGoogle Scholar. As Jones et al. put it, ‘Frequency distributions of public budget changes are leptokurtic for all cases studied thus far, and hence rule out the standard incremental model’, p. 857Google Scholar.

41 Bell, ‘Do We Really Need’, pp. 900–1Google Scholar.

42 Bell, ‘Do We Really Need’, p. 902Google Scholar.

43 Bell, ‘Do We Really Need’, p. 902Google Scholar.

44 Bell, ‘Do We Really Need’, p. 902Google Scholar and fn. 124.

45 Blyth, Mark, ‘The Transformation of the Swedish Model: Economic Ideas, Distributional Conflict and Institutional Change’, World Politics, 54 (2001), 1–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hay, Colin and Rosamond, Ben, ‘Globalisation, European Integration and the Discursive Construction of Economic Imperatives’, Journal of European Public Policy, 9 (2002), 147–167CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

46 Bell, ‘Do We Really Need’, p. 905Google Scholar (emphasis added).

47 Bell, ‘Do We Really Need’, p. 905Google Scholar.

48 ‘Simple’ polities or ‘single-actor’ systems (with majoritarian representation, unitary states and statist policy making) tend to generate more elaborate ‘communicative’ discourses between political elites and the general public, whereas ‘compound’ polities or ‘multi-actor’ systems (with proportional representation, federal or regionalized states, and corporatist or pluralist policy making) tend to favour more elaborate ‘co-ordinative’ discourses among policy actors – although all polities, of course, have both forms of discursive interaction. See Schmidt, The Futures of European Capitalism; and Democracy in Europe.

49 Bell, ‘Do We Really Need’, p. 904Google Scholar.

50 Bell, ‘Do We Really Need’, p. 905Google Scholar.

51 Bell, ‘Do We Really Need’, p. 906Google Scholar.

52 Bell, ‘Do We Really Need’, p. 900Google Scholar.