definition of political outcomes
Answers
Explanation:
A Brief History of Institutionalism
Institutionalism has a long established tradition among those interested in politics and political outcomes. Plato's Republic is a comparative study of institutions. Similarly, Aristotle's central concern in Politics is which kinds of political institutions will produce the best outcomes. James Madison must clearly also be seen as an early American ‘Institutionalist’ in that he was specifically concerned with which kinds of institutions would produce the best political outcomes and how the specific design of institutions would shape political outcomes.
Political scientists have also long been interested in institutions. Indeed, in its early years political science meant the study of political institutions (Wilson 1891). But, with some important exceptions (cf. Herring 1940, Key 1947), early political science was often more descriptive than analytical. ‘Comparative politics,’ in particular, consisted mostly of detailed configurative studies of different legal, administrative, and political structures (for a review and critique of this early comparative literature see Verba 1967). In the immediate postwar years a new generation of political scientists attempted to make the study of politics more ‘scientific.’ For many this effectively meant that political science ought to model itself on the ‘hard sciences’ which they believed was fundamentally a deductive process. Thus rather than studying the details of political life and inductively uncover the patterns of behavior and action, political ‘science’ should be a deductive science that seeks to discover of the general laws and fundamental forces that lay behind political action. Focusing on particular institutions, proponents this intellectual agenda implied, was ‘a-theoretical.’ Concomitant with the push for more abstract laws, political scientists were disillusioned by the failure of parliamentary institutions in Inter-war Weimar Germany (and later in post-colonial Africa) to prevent these polities from devolving into authoritarianism. Clearly, many argued, there were bigger, more important, indeed more fundamental, forces at work in politics and development than political institutions. These forces, they argued, should be the focus of political science.