PL 5202 Development Institutions and Finance

The New Institutionalism :

Organizational Factors in Political Life
James G. March and Johan P. Olsen
Adnan Fabyandi (25416022)
There are 5 basic concepts of institution for theoretical political science which have been emerged since
about 1950. First, it is contextual which is inclined to see politics as an integral part of society. Second, it
is reductionist which tends to see political phenomena as the aggregate consequences of individual
behavior. Next concept, it is utilitarian which means political actors see action as the product of calculated
self-interest. Fourth, it is functionalist which tends to see history as an efficient mechanism for reaching
uniquely appropriate equilibria. Finally, it is instrumentalist which is inclined to define decision making
and the allocation of resources as the central concerns of political life. These concepts then become the
driving forces to differentiate of the old institutionalism and the new one.
N

Basic Vision

o
1

Contextualism

Reductionism

Old Institutionalism

New Institutionalism

Political scientists tend to treat political

Politics as subordinate to exogenous

institutions

as

independent

factors,

forces, which is affected by it but are not

important

to

the

and

significantly affects the other way

understanding of collective life

Political institutions are depicted as

around
Political phenomena are best understood

determining,

as

individual

Utilitarianism

ordering,
motives,

ordering

or
and

modifying
as

acting

the

behavior

aggregate

consequences

comprehensible

at

of
the

autonomously in terms of institutional

individual or group level

needs
Political behavior is embedded in an

Political events are portrayed as the

institutional structure of rules, norms,

consequences of calculated decisions

expectations, and traditions that severely

limited the free play of individual will and
4

calculation
Political theory is inclined to accept the

Political theory is inclined to accept the

idea

inexorable

idea of survival to evolve through

Instrumentalis

historical movement
Political decision making primarily is

some form of efficient historical process

Political decision making has generally

portrayed as a process for developing a

given primacy to outcomes and either

sense of purpose, direction, identity, and

ignored symbolic actions as part of

Functionalism

of

progress

from

PL 5202 Development Institutions and Finance

belonging

manipulative efforts to control outcomes

The new institutionalism is not peculiar to political science, economics, anthropology and sociology,
although non-institutionalists visions never succeeded in the field of anthropology and sociology.
Therefore, new institutionalism is described as a recent thinking which is formed by blending elements of
an old institutionalism into the non-institutionalist styles of recent theories of politics. Furthermore, the
new institutionalism can be presented and discussed as terms of a narrow collection of challenges to
contemporary theoretical thinking in political science.