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Where Are the Institutions? The Limits of Vivien Schmidt's Constructivism

I welcome the opportunity to respond to Vivien Schmidt’s thoughtful views on my article. This is an important debate about institutional theory and how we explain institutional change. Yet, foregrounding agents and their ideas in such change processes, as Schmidt does, whilst leaving institutions (and wider structures) almost as residuals – as merely ‘meaning contexts’ – leaves too much out of the explanatory equation, in my view. I am sure we agree that agents, ideas and institutions all matter. The goal, then, should not be to privilege certain of these elements theoretically, but to theorize and study their interactions empirically – indeed, their mutually shaping or dialectical interactions over time. This is what drives institutional change. I will return to these central theoretical questions presently, but first I will respond briefly to Schmidt’s claims that I have misread the work of the initial targets of critique in my article. I invite interested readers to make their own assessments of my reading of Colin Hay and Mark Blyth. In relation to Schmidt’s work, I am accused of slicing and dicing her ‘complex set of arguments’, but in reality my article uses extensive quotes from her work to establish that she foregrounds agents and their ideas and relegates institutions to a residual, to entities which are derived from the ideas of agents. As she herself explains, institutions become ideational constructions, as arenas that ‘frame the discourse’. ‘The ‘‘institutionalism’’ in discursive institutionalism’, she writes, is not about ‘the external rule following structures of the three older institutionalisms’, but is instead reduced to the ‘constructs of meaning which are internal to ‘‘sentient’’ (thinking and speaking) agents’. For Schmidt, institutions appear as a ‘meaning context’, as providing ‘background information’, or as ‘contingent (the result of agent’s thoughts, words and actions)’. Schmidt also argues that the ‘deliberate nature of discourse, allows agents to ‘conceive of and talk about institutions as objects at a distance, and to dissociate themselves from them’. In more recent work, Schmidt argues that constructivist institutionalists ‘insist that institutions are ideas.’