Abstract

The new institutionalism arose in the 1980s, more than thirty years ago, in reaction to narrowly individualistic approaches in economics, political science, and sociology. Behavioralists and conventional neo-classical economics “interpreted collective political and economic behavior as the aggregate consequence of individual choice…[and] viewed institutions as epiphenomenal, merely the sum of individual level properties” (Powell and Dimaggio 1991: 2). The new institutionalists, building on a long tradition, claim that rules, norms, and customs—often arbitrary and artificial—structure human interaction, and they use institutionalist approaches to explain major macro-outcomes and long-term secular change.