Institutionalization Research Paper

Building on work of Witmer (1964) and Price (1964), Polsby (1968) published ‘The institutionalization of the United States House of Representatives’ and, with colleagues, published a companion piece (1969) on the rise of seniority in the United States House of Representatives. In the 1968 article, Polsby cites the political development literature including Weber (1947), Durkheim (1938) and Huntington (1965). In examining the development of the US Houses of Representatives Polsby argues from organization theory (e.g., Selznik (1953) that ‘the institution’ of the US House of Representatives becomes separable from its environment and develops as an institution within the US political system that signals its adaptability and development. The three characteristics Polsby studies are:

(a) boundaries: the differentiation of the institution sufficiently differentiated from its environment so that members need special skills to rise to leadership positions;

(b) internal complexity: the rise of committees and a seniority system which captures the benefits of specialization, and

(c) universalism: the rise of nonpartisanship (or objectivity) in determining whom the House members will be in the case of disputed elections.

The development of the House as an institution necessitating special skills for its leaders is measured by the length of time that it takes a member to become the Speaker. Polsby shows change occurring over the nineteenth century where early in the century Henry Clay could became Speaker in his first term whereas by the end of the century the Speakers on average had served 20 years before becoming Speaker. The ‘institutionalization of specialization’ in the House was demonstrated by the absence of seniority violations on committees occurring early in the twentieth century. Likewise the rise of fairness is measured by the criteria applied to election disputes—that is, as bi-partisan voting behavior on contested seats rose, Polsby claims that objectivity within the House also rose to the status of a norm.

Each of these patterns of behavior shifted sharply in the 1890–1910 period—Polsby called this period the ‘Big Bang period’ —in the institutionalization of the House. Many articles on the institutionalization of other legislative bodies followed. The bodies studied ranged from state legislatures to the mother of Parliaments—the House of Commons (Hibbing 1988). Much of the early work treated institutionalization as though it was a full-blown theory. Polsby, however, argued more accurately that he had described a tripartite dependent variable over time to show that discernable patterns had developed. The view of institutionalization as patterned behavior is closer to sociological theories of institutions and it is to this tradition that I turn.

Institutions are at the core of sociology (Durkheim 1938) and in general one can view an institution as organized, standing procedures which taken together constitute ‘the rules of the game’ (Easton 1981). Such rules are seen as exogenous to participants. This general view has not led to clear and clean usage. In the analysis that follows I take the definition of Jepperson and use his conceptual scheme:

Institution represents a social order or pattern that has attained a certain state or property; institutionalization denotes the process of such attainment (1991, p. 145).

On this view, an institution is a social pattern that stands over time and, when there are departures from this pattern, they are sanctioned without collective mobilization. Political institutions like legislatures, bureaucracies and executives are therefore well suited to institutional analysis.

The State Department of the United States government is such an institution. Members in the organization are rewarded or punished for their behavior in regard to the ‘rules of the game’ and over time rules can change. Precisely because institutions can change institutionalization per se does not, as some have thought, necessarily require stability or survival. In fact, shortly after Polsby et al. (1969) and Abram and Cooper (1968) published their work on the institutionalization of seniority, the US House of Representatives essentially ended seniority or, at a minimum, severely constrained it by deposing four senior chairmen.

Institutional change is dependent on context, which can be cultural, environmental or structural. It is this relativity that makes pinning down the meaning of institutionalization hard to do, because the property may change. The best way to think of institutionalization is to see it as a particular state of an institution. Thus, in Polsby’s classic article, differentiation and specialization in the House were institutionalized, as attested to by the increasingly lengthy career path of Speakers and the rise of a pure seniority system, both important properties of the House of Representatives at the time of the studies.

The sociological concept of institutionalization began to fall out of favor in political science due largely to two factors: first, most of what could be studied a la Polsby was studied and second and more importantly, the ‘new’ institutionalism driven by economic reasoning came to the fore in Political Science. The analytic tradition of Coase (1937), Williamson (1985) and North (1981) and others (Nelson and Winter 1982) modified the traditional maximizing assumptions of classical economics where individuals maximize behavior over stable preference orderings. Their modifications are that individuals do maximize, though they do so constrained by cognitive limits, incomplete information and difficulties in enforcing agreements. Thus institutions arise to solve a problem and to maintain the solution when the benefits derived from the extant institution exceed the costs. Institutions essentially do this by reducing the uncertainty associated with transactions.

William Riker and his students (especially Shepsle) brought this economic approach to the study of political institutions. According to this approach, the US Congress creates committees and rules in order to solve the recycling or instability problem. In Shepsle’s (1986) own words, political institutions are

ex ante agreements about a structure of cooperation … which economize on transaction costs, reduce opportunism and other forms of agency slippage

—thereby increasing cooperation. This view of legislative institutions is disputed by Krehbiel (1991) and Krehbiel and Gilligan (1987, 1988) who argue that Congress established committees not to solve the cycling problem but rather to solve its information problems. Both viewpoints construe the Congress as an institution where policy is dependent upon the agenda-setting powers inherent in legislative rules. In short ‘the new institutionalism’ sees institutions as choices made by actors for self-interested reasons and the survival of institutions and their features is costbenefit determined. The initial problem being solved may, among others, be informational, cycling, credible commitment or coordination. Thus the costs of starting the institution are lower than the benefits conferred. Likewise, the continued existence of the institution depends upon benefits exceeding costs. On this view the process of institutionalization over time is planned, chosen and sustained as long as benefits exceed costs.

The sociological response to the inroads made by economic treatments of institutions approach has been work led by March (1981), March and Olson (1984) and Meyer (1977, 1980), which argues that, contrary to economic theory, the institutionalization process is one where organizational structure evolves over time in an unplanned, adaptive, historically determined fashion. In political science, the work of Terry Moe (1987) fits this view, as does work by Ragsdale and Theis (1997) on the American presidency. Moe argues that rational choice institutionalism overemphasizes the formal mechanisms of legislative control at the cost of neglecting more fundamental, indirect, unintentional and systemic societal causes.

The field of international relations in political science also features the conflict between rational choice models of institutionalization and sociological theories, especially in the work of Krasner (1983), Keohane (1984, 1986) and 1988), and Young (1986). The argument is essentially that the economic model cannot account for international institutions because said institutions are clearly a long way from efficient. The sociological view (especially Meyer on systems) is that international institutions do not merely reflect the preferences and power of the units constituting them; rather they shape preferences and power. Recent illustrations of this perspective include Bennett’s (1997) work on alliance duration and Martin’s (1995) work on firms’ preferences. The historical institutionalism of Skowronek (1982), Skocpol (1992) and others also adapts to this argument, holding that the development of the American state and its subsequent policies are not the result of a logical, chosen rational process, rather both the state and its policies are the product of exceptional events, individuals, and circumstances that at crucial historical times determine or co-determine the future of institutional development. Moreover, unintended consequences often outweigh the intended and anticipated consequences.

In sum, early work on institutionalization by Polsby (1968), Cooper (1968) and Price (1964) was already embedded in the sociological tradition. It later was overtaken by economics-based theories of institutions and institutionalism illustrated by the work of Shepsle (1986), Weingast (1988, 1995), McCubbins (1987, 1993), Cox (1993), Krehbiel (1991) and others. The sociological approach has begun to revive as March (1981) and March and Olson (1984) and in the study of American politics Terry Moe’s (1987) works have come to be widely read and cited. Sociological views of institutionalization seem to dominate the field of international relations with the work of March (1981) and Meyer (1980) being most influential on scholars in this field.

Unsolved puzzles in this field include the following: first, what is an institution? The economic tradition views institutions as the product of human designs where individuals behave instrumentally in order to achieve ends. The sociological tradition views institutions as emerging from human activity, but not necessarily, or even often, the product of conscious design. This conflict will be resolved by careful historical-empirical studies that ascertain the origins of institutions such as committees, bureaucracies and so forth. Second, do institutions reflect the preferences of individual or corporate actions or do they reflect collective outcomes of group interactions? This conflict will be more difficult to resolve because, in economics, preferences are assumed, not studied and in sociology they are not variables in any individual sense. Third, and most relevant for institutionalization, do institutions respond quickly to individual interests and exogenous change as economic theory would have us believe, or do they respond glacially as sociology would have us believe?

Consider the original work on the House of Representatives where change occurs infrequently but when it occurs, it happens over a 20-year period—‘the Big Bang 1890–1910’—and then is stable over another 50 years. This appears to be glacial change with punctuated equilibrium in the sociological tradition. The economic perspective leads us to believe that change is more rapid and driven by standard costbenefit analysis. While there is no seminal work on the institutionalization of an institution in the economic tradition, Cox and McCubbins (1993) and Aldrich’s (1995) work on political parties are a good beginning. Parties are created to solve problems, of coordination, distribution, etc. and, over time, parties change as exogenous shocks and members’ preferences shift. A study of well-known institutions, such as the House of Representatives, that contrasts the sociological and economic views would make a major contribution by virtue of its being able to pin down the reasons for creating institutions (see Cooper (1970) on the origins of committees for an example) and the rate at which they change. At present, excellent studies of various institutions from one perspective—see Meyer (1977) on junior colleges as institutions—contribute to one perspective but the same institutions are not studied from the other discipline’s perspective. Johnson and Libecap’s (1994) study of the causes of bureaucratic reform in the 1880s in the USA is a classic example of institutional change studied from the perspective of economic theory which could be easily restudied from a sociological perspective. Excellent studies of separate institutions (often at different times) may enhance discipline specific research but until the same institution is examined from both perspectives over the same time period, knowledge in this area will be partial and fragmented.

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