The New Institutionalism and International Relations
Abstract
The “New Institutionalist” movement that swept the fields of Political Science and Sociology in the late 1980s resurrected interest in the study and structure of institutions within those fields, a subject that had been largely abandoned in the wake of the behavioral revolution of the 1960s that had swept the social sciences. Out of the foundational structure of the New Institutionalism which stressed the centrality of institutions in preference formation, would emerge two distinct schools of research. The first school (Historical Institutionalism), utilized mainly by Political Scientists, would look to the background framework of institutions, in order to better understand the norms they fostered. The second school (Sociological Institutionalism), utilized mainly by Sociologists, would look towards complex networks of social and economic relationships in order to understand preference formation within institutions. Both of these schools within the New Institutionalism have generated both a useful toolkit of methods, and a rich source of findings, that could be of much use to International Relations theory. Unfortunately, the New Institutionalist movement has been largely ignored by International Relations theorists and practitioners. The macro-level analysis undertaken by so much of International Relations research is a perfect setting for New Institutionalist research which could, through a blending of macro and micro-level analysis, shed new light on the relationship between domestic and system-level factors within International Relations.