The Slaves of Institutionalism? A Comment on Bell and Hindmoor
| Author | Michael Moran |
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-856X.12047 |
| Published date | 01 February 2015 |
| Date | 01 February 2015 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
The Slaves of Institutionalism? A
Comment on Bell and Hindmoor
Michael Moran
The discipline of economics was rightly damned for its failure to anticipate the great
financial crisis, but we can say something even more damning about the discipline
of political science: it hardly seems to have noticed that the crisis happened at all.
We have to look to the upstart younger sibling, international political economy, to
find any sustained political analysis (for an early exception from a scholar who
represents an older tradition of political economy, see Gamble 2009). This failure is
not due to sloth or incompetence, as might have been the case a generation ago. It
reflects a kind of institutionalised obtuseness. As Goodin (2009) observed, modern
political science invented itself as ‘the discipline of the state’. The result has been an
obsessive professionalism, an insistence on an academic division of labour confining
the discipline to the study of the state, and putting the economic system and its
misfortunes at the periphery of research. Bell and Hindmoor’s study is therefore
doubly welcome: as a fine piece of research in its own right; and as a fine piece of
research from two scholars who consciously identify themselves with political
science on the single most important economic event in the advanced capitalist
world in living memory Moreover, their accomplishment is due to a quite old-
fashioned concern to ask questions prompted by comparative observation. Notably:
why did some nations wreck their banking systems, while others escaped largely
unscathed? In answering this question they pursue their quarry into the banking
parlours of the advanced capitalist world: now, we no longer have to look to the
higher journalism (Lewis 2010) or popular anthropology (Tett 2009) to hear the
voices of bankers and their regulators. Political scientists are finally on the job.
Yet nobody escapes their intellectual history,and this fine study, while it shows Bell
and Hindmoor transcending some of the myopia of mainstream political science,
also shows them still imprisoned in its intellectual cage. The cage is formed by
institutionalism, a typical example of the futility of much professionalised political
science. Institutionalism has been just about the most influential theoretical frame-
work in political science for the last three decades. Its strength, and its weakness,
are encapsulated in this passage from the core argument of March and Olsen’s
classic opening salvo published just over thirty years ago:
The argument that institutions can be treated as political actors is a claim
of institutional coherence and autonomy. The claim of coherence is nec-
essary in order to treat institutions as decision makers ....The claim of
autonomy is necessary to establish that institutions are more than simple
mirrors of social forces (1984, 738–9.)
The claim for coherence and autonomy immediately reinstated the study of insti-
tutions as a prime purpose of social analysis, and since political science historically
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doi: 10.1111/1467-856X.12047 BJPIR: 2015 VOL 17, 23–26
© 2014 The Author.British Journal of Politics and International Relations © 2014
Political Studies Association
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