Do We Really Need a New ‘Constructivist Institutionalism’ to Explain Institutional Change?

British Journal of Political Science

Volumn 41, Issue 4, 2011, Pages 883-906

  Bell, Stephen ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES; AUSTRALIA; CRITICISM; DISCRETION; INSTITUTIONALISM; RATIONAL CHOICE; SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISM;

EID: 84861892553     PISSN: 00071234     EISSN: 14692112     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0007123411000147     Document Type: Article

References (144)

1. Vivian Lowndes, ‘The Institutionalist Approach’, in David Marsh and Gerry Stoker, eds, Theory and Methods in Political Science (London: Palgrave, 2010), pp. 60-79.
2. Colin Hay, ‘Ideas, Interests and Institutions in the Comparative Political Economy of Great Transformations’, Review of International Political Economy, 11 (2004), 204-26; Mark Blyth, Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Vivien Schmidt, ‘Taking Ideas and Discourse Seriously: Explaining Change Through Discursive Institutionalism as the Fourth “New Institutionalism”, European Political Science Review, 2 (2010), 1-25.
3. Craig Parsons, ‘Constructivism and Interpretive Theory’, in Marsh and Stoker, eds, Theory and Methods in Political Science, pp. 80-98, at p. 80.
4. Paul Pierson, ‘The Limits of Design: Explaining Institutional Origins and Design’, Governance, 13 (2000), 475-99, pp. 490 and 493.
5. Pierson, ‘The Limits of Design'; Paul Pierson, ‘Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics’, American Political Science Review, 94 (2000), 251-67; James Mahoney, ‘Path Dependence in Historical Sociology’, Theory and Society, 29 (2000), 507-48; Douglas North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
6. Hermann Schwartz, ‘Down the Wrong Path: Path Dependence, Increasing Returns and Historical Institutionalism’ (unpublished paper available from the author, 2004), p. 1.
7. Colin Hay and Daniel Wincott, ‘Structure, Agency and Historical Institutionalism’, Political Studies, 46 (1998), 951-7, p. 952; Johan P. Olson, ‘Change and Continuity: An Institutional Approach to Institutions and Democratic Government’, European Political Science Review, 1 (2009), 3-32, p. 3. Also, see B. Guy Peters, Jon Pierre and Desmond S. King, ‘The Politics of Path Dependency: Political Conflict in Historical Institutionalism’, Journal of Politics, 67 (2005), 1275-300.
8. Colin Crouch, Capitalist Diversity and Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 4.
9. Sven Steinmo and Kathleen Thelen, ‘Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Perspective’, in Kathleen Thelen, Sven Steinmo and Frank Longstreth, eds, Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1-32, at p. 16.
10. Sven Steinmo, Taxation and Democracy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 12.
11. Stephen Krasner, ‘Approaches to the State: Alternative Conceptions and Historical Dynamics’, Comparative Politics, 16 (1984), 223-46, p. 234. Also, see John Ikenberry, ‘Conclusion: An Institutional Approach to American Foreign Economic Policy’, International Organization, 42 (1998), 219-43, p. 223.
12. Steinmo and Thelen, ‘Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Perspective’, p. 15.
13. Hay and Wincott, ‘Structure, Agency and Historical Institutionalism’, p. 952.
14. From Dennis Wrong, ‘The Over-socialized Conception of Man in Modern Sociology’, American Sociological Review, 26 (1961), 183-93. Also, see John W. Meyer, ‘World Society, Institutional Theories, and the Actor’, Annual Review of Sociology, 36 (2010), 1-20.
15. Neil Fligstein, ‘Social Skill and the Theory of Fields’, Sociological Theory, 19 (2001), 105-25, p. 110.
16. Colin Hay, ‘Globalization and Public Policy’, in Martin Rein, Michael Moran and Robert Goodin, eds, Oxford Handbook of Public Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 587-606, p. 590.
17. Mark Blyth, ‘Any More Bright Ideas: The Ideational Turn in Comparative Political Economy’, Comparative Politics, 29 (1997), 229-50, p. 230.
18. Vivien Schmidt, ‘Discursive Institutionalism: The Explanatory Power of Ideas and Discourse’, Annual Review of Political Science, 11 (2008), 303-26, pp. 313-14. Here, Schmidt emphasizes not only the role of subjective ideas, but also inter-subjective ideational phenomena, such as discourse, or the ‘interactive processes by which ideas are conveyed’.
19. Schmidt, ‘Discursive Institutionalism’, p. 314.
20. Schmidt, ‘Discursive Institutionalism’, p. 314.
21. Vivien Schmidt, ‘From Historical Institutionalism to Discursive Institutionalism: Explaining Change in Comparative Political Economy’ (paper given at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Boston, Mass., 2008).
22. Schmidt, ‘Discursive Institutionalism’, p. 316.
23. Hay, ‘Globalization and Public Policy’, p. 603, emphasis added.
24. Mark Blyth, Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 17.
25. Blyth, Great Transformations, p. 17. See also Peter Hall, ed., The Power of Economic Ideas: Keynesianism Across Nations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), and Margaret Weir and Theda Skocpol, ‘State Structures and the Possibilities of “Keynesian” Responses to the Great Depression in Sweden, Britain and the United States’, in Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol, eds, Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 107-68.
26. Blyth, Great Transformations, p. 17.
27. Blyth, Great Transformations, p. 270.
28. Blyth, Great Transformations, p. 270.
29. Blyth, Great Transformations, p. 27.
30. Blyth, Great Transformations, p. 251.
31. Blyth, Great Transformations, p. 15.
32. John Kurt Jacobsen, ‘Much Ado about Ideas: The Cognitive Factor in Economic Policy’, World Politics, 47 (1995), 283-310, p. 297. In Colin Hay, ‘Ideas, Interests and Institutions in the Comparative Political Economy of Great Transformations’, p. 210, Blyth's work is deemed: ‘The overly parsimonious conception of crisis as moments of Knightian uncertainty may, in the end, obscure more than it reveals, turning the moment of crisis into something of a black box’.
33. Blyth, Great Transformations, p. 29.
34. Hay, ‘Globalization and Public Policy, p. 65; Blyth, Great Transformations, p. 208.
35. Hay, ‘Globalization and Public Policy, p. 64.
36. Hay, ‘Globalization and Public Policy, p. 64.
37. Colin Hay and Ben Rosamond, ‘Globalisation, European Integration and the Discursive Construction of Economic Imperatives’, Journal of European Public Policy, 9 (2002), 147-67, p. 147, emphasis added.
38. Blyth, Great Transformations, p. 11.
39. Blyth, Great Transformations, p. 11.
40. Blyth, Great Transformations, p. 11.
41. Blyth, Great Transformations, p. 34.
42. Blyth, Great Transformations, pp. 171-2.
43. Blyth, Great Transformations, p. 270.
44. For a similar critique on this point, see: Colin Hay, Political Analysis (Basingstoke, Hants.: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 214-15; Colin Hay, ‘Constructivist Institutionalism’, in Rod A. W. Rhodes, Sarah Binder and Bert Rockman, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Political Institutions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 56-74, at p. 70.
45. Vivien Schmidt, ‘Institutionalism’, in Colin Hay, Michael Lister and David Marsh, eds, The State: Theories and Issues (London: Palgrave, 2006), pp. 98-117, at p. 113.
46. Schmidt, ‘Discursive Institutionalism’, p. 314.
47. Schmidt, ‘Taking Ideas and Discourse Seriously’, p. 4.
48. Schmidt, ‘From Historical Institutionalism to Discursive Institutionalism’, p. 15; Schmidt, ‘Discursive Institutionalism’, p. 314. This is veering close to the fully interpretivist or postmodern constructivism found in Mark Bevir and Rod A. W. Rhodes, The State as Cultural Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
49. Schmidt, ‘Discursive Institutionalism’, p. 316.
50. Emanuel Adler, ‘Seizing the Middle Ground’, European Journal of International Relations, 3 (1997), 319-63.
51. ‘Modern constructivism’, as Adler puts it in Adler, ‘Seizing the Middle Ground’, pp. 321-2.
52. Vivien Schmidt, ‘Institutionalism’, p. 113. Bevir and Rhodes, from their interpretive or postmodern perspective, criticize Hay on this front, pointing to his ‘clear reluctance to adopt a thorough-going constructivist perspective’ in Bevir and Rhodes, The State as Cultural Practice, p. 37.
53. Hay, ‘Globalization and Public Policy’, p. 62. On a similar point, see Colin Hay and Daniel Wincott, ‘Structure, Agency and Historical Institutionalism’.
54. Schmidt, ‘From Historical Institutionalism to Discursive Institutionalism’, p. 1.
55. Blyth, Great Transformations, p. 23.
56. Schmidt, ‘Discursive Institutionalism’, p. 316.
57. Yet there are important differences even within the path-dependency approach, some of which allow room for agency and are thus, in principle, compatible with an agent-centred HI framework. Approaches that focus on path dependency can be distinguished by the degree of determinism implied by such dependency. In William H. Sewell, ‘Three Temporalities: Towards an Eventful Sociology’, in Terence J. McDonald, ed., The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 245-80, at pp. 262-3, it is claimed that earlier events will ‘affect’ later outcomes (implying room for contingency and agency), whilst Mahoney writes about ‘event chains that have deterministic properties’ in Mahoney, ‘Path Dependence in Historical Sociology’, p. 507. Pierson is somewhere in between, implying a degree of agency, although his quote above that past choices by agents ‘seriously limit their room to manoeuvre’ implies substantial stickiness in Pierson, ‘The Limits of Design’, pp. 490-3.
58. Crouch, Capitalist Diversity and Change, p. 3.
59. Schmidt, ‘Discursive Institutionalism’, p. 315; John Searle, The Social Construction of Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1995).
60. Searle, The Social Construction of Reality, p. 28; Adler, ‘Seizing the Middle Ground’, p. 322.
61. Mark Bevir and Rod A. W. Rhodes, Interpreting British Politics (London: Routledge, 2003). Similarly: Bevir and Rhodes, The State as Cultural Practice; Stuart McAnulla, ‘Challenging the New Interpretivist Approach: Towards a Critical Realist Alternative’, British Politics, 1 (2006), 113-38, p. 122; Adler, ‘Seizing the Middle Ground’, p. 332.
62. Ian Marsh, ‘Keeping Ideas in Their Place: In Praise of Thin Constructivism’, Australian Journal of Political Science, 44 (2009), 679-96.
63. Margaret Archer, Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 2.
64. Stefano Guzzini, ‘A Reconstruction of Constructivism in International Relations’, European Journal of International Relations, 6 (2000), 147-82, p. 148.
65. Hay and Rosamond, ‘Globalisation, European Integration and the Discursive Construction of Economic Imperatives’, p. 147.
66. Steinmo and Thelen, ‘Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Perspective’, p. 17. For more on this point, see: Andrew Cortell and Susan Petersen, ‘Altered States: Explaining Domestic Institutional Change’, British Journal of Political Science, 29 (1999), 177-203; Wolfgang Streeck and Kathleen Thelen, Beyond Continuity: Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
67. Hay, ‘Globalisation and Public Policy’, p. 62, emphasis in original. Original quote from Steinmo and Thelen, ‘Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Perspective’, p. 10.
68. In particular: John L. Campbell, ‘Mechanisms of Evolutionary Change in Economic Governance: Interaction, Interpretation and Bricolage’, in Lars Magnusson and Jan Ottoson, eds, Evolutionary Economics and Path Dependence (London: Edward Elgar, 1997), pp. 10-32; John L. Campbell, ‘Ideas, Politics and Public Policy’, Annual Review of Sociology, 28 (2002), 21-38; and John L. Campbell, Institutional Change and Globalization (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004).
69. Campbell, ‘Mechanisms of Evolutionary Change in Economic Governance’, p. 15. Also, see Crouch, Capitalist Diversity and Change; and Colin Crouch, ‘How to Do Post-Determinist Institutional Analysis’, Socio-Economic Review, 5 (2007), 527-67.
70. Marc Schneiberg, ‘What's on the Path? Path Dependence, Organizational Diversity and the Problem of Institutional Change in the US Economy’, Socio-Economic Review, 5 (2007), 47-80, p. 50.
71. Schneiberg, ‘What's on the Path?’ p. 50.
72. Stephen Bell and Hui Feng, ‘Beyond Path Dependence? Agents, Institutions and Path Shaping Change in Chinese Monetary Policy’ (unpublished paper, available from the authors, 2010).
73. Peter A. Hall. ‘Politics as a Structured Process in Space and Time’ (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., 2010).
74. A similar argument is made in Pepper D. Culpepper, ‘Institutional Change in Contemporary Capitalism: Coordinated Financial Systems since 1990’, World Politics, 57 (2005), 173-99.
75. Steinmo and Thelen, ‘Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Perspective’, p. 14.
76. Hall, The Power of Economic Ideas; Desmond S. King, Actively Seeking Work? The Politics of Unemployment and Welfare Policy in the US and Great Britain (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995); Margaret Weir, Politics and Jobs: The Boundaries of Employment Policy in the United States (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992).
77. Victoria Hattam, Labor Visions and State Power: The Origins of Business Unionism in the United States (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 12.
78. Jeffrey T. Checkel, ‘The Constructivist Turn in International Relations Theory’, World Politics
79. (1998), 324-48, pp. 340-1.
80. Dennis Wrong, ‘The Over-socialized Conception of Man in Modern Sociology’.
81. Checkel, ‘The Constructivist Turn in International Relations Theory’, p. 339.
82. On this point, see: William R. Clark, ‘Agents and Structures: Two Views of Preferences, Two Views of Institutions’, International Studies Quarterly, 42 (1998), 245-70; William H. Sewell, ‘A Theory of Agency: Duality, Agency and Transformation’, American Journal of Sociology, 98 (1992), 1-29; and Steinmo, Taxation and Democracy, p. 2000. Weir uses ‘bounded innovation’ in a somewhat similar way in Margaret Weir, ‘Ideas and the Politics of Bounded Innovation’, in Kathleen Thelen, Sven Steinmo and Frank Longstreth, eds, Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 188-216.
83. Nevertheless, how the deductive parsimony of rational choice approaches are to be melded with such specifications of ‘thick rationality’ remains something of a challenge and the concept of active agents used here (in contrast to at least the standard deductive rational choice models) implies inductive explorations of endogenous preference formation.
84. James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen, ‘A Theory of Gradual Institutional Change’, in James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen, eds, Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency and Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 1-37, at pp. 11-13.
85. Streeck and Thelen, Beyond Continuity, p. 14.
86. North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance.
87. Kellee S. Tsai, ‘Adaptive Informal Institutions and Endogenous Institutional Change in China’, World Politics, 59 (2006), 116-41, pp. 117-18.
88. Stephen Bell and Hui Feng, ‘The Rise of the People's Bank of China: The Structural Foundations of Institutional Change’ (unpublished).
89. Robert C. Lieberman, ‘Ideas, Institutions, and Political Order: Explaining Institutional Change’, American Political Science Review, 96 (2002), 697-712, p. 703. See also: Jens Beckert, ‘Agency, Entrepreneurs, and Institutional Change: The Role of Strategic Choice and Institutionalized Practices in Organization’, Organization Studies, 20 (1999), 777-99, p. 780; Schneiberg, ‘What's on the Path?’
90. Crouch, ‘How to Do Post-Determinist Institutional Analysis’.
91. Fritz W. Scharpf, Games Real Actors Play: Actor Centered Institutionalism in Policy Research (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1997), p. 36. See also: Elizabeth S. Clemens and James M. Cook, ‘Politics and Institutionalism: Explaining Durability and Change’, Annual Review of Sociology, 25 (1999), 441-66.
92. Mahoney and Thelen, ‘A Theory of Gradual Institutional Change’, pp. 8-14, at p. 14, emphasis in original.
93. Although acknowledging the impact of the past, the ‘contingency’ in Johnson's account is partly a product of the ‘freedom of choice’ opened up by critical junctures, such as the collapse of communist states in Eastern Europe. Change after such junctures, however, is shaped by earlier institutional legacies in the case of ‘passive’ policies, which largely alter or adapt earlier institutions. Alternatively, in the case of ‘active’ policies, which build new institutions, Johnson suggests that change is shaped more by ‘state capacity’, in Juliet Johnson, ‘Past Dependence or Path Contingency? Institutional Design in Post-communist Financial Systems’, in Grzegorz Ekiert and Stephen E. Hanson, eds, Capitalism and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003), pp. 289-316, at p. 292.
94. Siobhan Harty, ‘Theorizing Institutional Change’, in André Lacours, ed., New Institutionalism: Theory and Analysis (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2005), pp. 51-79, at p. 65.
95. Cortell and Petersen, ‘Altered States’.
96. Harty, ‘Theorizing Institutional Change’, p. 65. For an opposing view to Harty, see Steinmo and Thelen, ‘Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Perspective’, p. 15.
97. Harty, ‘Theorizing Institutional Change’, p. 65.
98. Blyth, Great Transformations, p. 8.
99. Harty, ‘Theorizing Institutional Change’.
100. See Johannes Lindner, ‘Institutional Stability and Change: Two Sides of the Same Coin’, Journal of European Public Policy, 10 (2003), 912-35.
101. Hay, ‘Globalization and Public Policy’, p. 65.
102. Ira Katznelson, ‘Periodization and Preferences: Reflections on Purposive Action in Comparative Historical Social Science’, in James Mahoney and Dietrich Reuschemeyer, eds, Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 270-304, at p. 283.
103. Campbell, Institutional Change and Globalization; although Schmidt agrees that the ‘shift in historical institutionalism y to incremental or evolutionary approaches has gone a long way toward overcoming institutional stickiness order to account for change’, she still maintains (erroneously) that ‘problems remain’ and alleges that HI has no agent-centred account; see Schmidt, ‘From Historical Institutionalism to Discursive Institutionalism’, p. 1.
104. Kathleen Thelen, How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, Japan and the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Streeck and Thelen, Beyond Continuity; Campbell, Institutional Change and Globalization; Mahoney and Thelen, ‘A Theory of Gradual Institutional Change’.
105. Kathleen Thelen, ‘How Institutions Evolve: Insights from Comparative Historical Analysis’, in James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, eds, Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 208-40, p. 225.
106. ‘Layering’, ‘conversion’ and ‘bricolage’ are terms found in Campbell, Institutional Change and Globalization, and in Streeck and Thelen, Beyond Continuity. Harty's point is made in Harty, ‘Theorizing Institutional Change’, p. 60.
107. Kathleen Thelen, ‘Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Perspective’, Annual Review of Political Science, 2 (1999), 369-404, p. 384; Jonas Pontussen, ‘From Comparative Public Policy to Political Economy: Putting Institutions in Their Place and Taking Interests Seriously’, Comparative Political Studies, 28 (2005), 117-47.
108. For the view that ‘crises propel change’, see Krasner, ‘Approaches to the State’. For reinforced path dependency, see Pierson, ‘Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics’, as well as Pierson, ‘The Limits of Design’. For structural environmental changes, refer to Mahoney and Thelen, ‘A Theory of Gradual Institutional Change’.
109. Bob Jessop, State Theory: Putting Capitalist States in Their Place (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990). See also Colin Hay, Re-Stating Social and Political Change (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1996).
110. Bell and Feng, The Rise of the People's Bank of China.
111. Pontussen, ‘From Comparative Public Policy to Political Economy’, p. 126.
112. Archer, Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation, p. 2.
113. Adler, ‘Seizing the Middle Ground’, p. 330; McAnulla, ‘Challenging the New Interpretivist Approach’, p. 121, emphasis in original.
114. See Margaret Archer, Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 197; Margaret Archer, ‘For Structure: Its Reality, Properties and Powers: A Reply to Antony King’, Sociological Review, 48 (2000), 464-72, p. 465; Archer, Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation, p. 2.
115. Margaret Archer, Realist Social Theory.
116. Archer, Realist Social Theory, p. 1.
117. Alexander Wendt, ‘The Agent-Structure Problem in International Relations Theory’, International Organization, 41 (1987), 335-70, p. 359.
118. Wendt, ‘The Agent-Structure Problem in International Relations Theory’, p. 359.
119. Culpepper, ‘Institutional Change in Contemporary Capitalism, p. 197.
120. Culpepper, ‘Institutional Change in Contemporary Capitalism, p. 197.
121. Archer, ‘For Structure’, p. 465.
122. Archer, Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation, p. 7.
123. Stuart McAnulla, ‘Making Hay with Actualism? The Need for a Realist Concept of Structure’, Politics, 25 (2005), 31-8, p. 32.
124. See Stephen Bell, Australia's Money Mandarins: The Reserve Bank and the Politics of Money (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), chaps 4 and 5.
125. Paul Kelly, ‘The Reserve Can Bank on Independence’, The Australian, 16 August 2000.
126. This viewpoint is elaborated in Colin Hay, ‘Narrating Crisis: The Discursive Construction of the “Winter of Discontent”, Sociology, 30 (1996), 253-77.
127. Bell, Australia's Money Mandarins, p. 54.
128. Bernie Fraser, ‘Understanding Australia's Foreign Debt and the Solutions’, Reserve Bank of Australia Bulletin (August 1990), p. 13.
129. Harty, ‘Theorizing Institutional Change’.
130. Hay, ‘Globalization and Public Policy’, p. 65.
131. Probably the frankest statement of the new resolve came from (then Deputy Governor) Ian Macfarlane in 1992: ‘It may have been possible to have a somewhat smaller recession if all the policy guns had been quickly turned towards maximum expansionary impact. But if we had followed this course how could people credibly have believed we were serious about reducing inflation?yThe central point is that on this occasion we had to run monetary policy somewhat tighter than in earlier recessions and take the risk that the fall in output would be greater than forecast. To do less than this would be to throw away a once-in-a-decade opportunity for Australia to gain an internationally respectable inflation rate’. (Quoted in The Australian, 22 May 1992.)
132. The pattern of institutional interaction can also be important in helping to empower or enable actors. In this case, the relationship between the RBA, the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C) and the federal Treasury proved important in providing authoritative backing for the push against inflation and the move towards central bank independence (CBI). Michael Keating, the Head of Prime Minister and Cabinet at the time, argues that PM&C was supportive of the push against inflation, especially when the depths of the recession became obvious. But he also points to Treasury's even greater significance in this context: ‘In my view the Bank did not enjoy sufficient independence at the time that it could have run an anti-inflation policy purely on its own initiative, even if it had been fully united in this endeavour. In fact the role of Treasury was perhaps almost as critical as that of the Bank in this whole policy episode’. (Written communication to the author, 23 August 2003.)
133. Bell, Australia's Money Mandarins, pp. 77-8.
134. John Pitchford, ‘A Skeptical View of Australia's Current Account and Debt Problem’, Australian Economic Review, 22 (1989), 5-13.
135. Pitchford, ‘A Sceptical View of Australia's Current Account and Debt Problem’, p. 13.
136. The rise of economic rationalism in Australia is told by Michael Pusey, Economic Rationalism in Canberra (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and also Stephen Bell, Ungoverning the Economy: The Political Economy of Australian Economic Policy (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1997).
137. Bell, Australia's Money Mandarins, p. 67.
138. Bell, Australia's Money Mandarins, p. 54.
139. Stephen Bell, ‘The Power of Ideas: The Ideational Mediation of the Structural Power of Business’, (unpublished paper, available from the author, 2010).
140. Stephen Bell, ‘How Tight Are the Policy Constraints? The Policy Convergence Thesis, Institutionally Situated Actors and Expansionary Monetary Policy in Australia’, New Political Economy, 10 (2005), 67-92.
141. Quoted in Steve Burrell, ‘Yes, He's the Gov’, Sydney Morning Herald, 27 November 1999.
142. Kahtryn Sikkink, Ideas and Institutions: Developmentalism in Brazil and Argentina (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 3.
143. Hay, ‘Globalization and Public Policy’, p. 65.
144. Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, in David Fernbach, ed., Surveys in Exile: Political Writings, Vol. 2 (New York: Penguin, 1973), p. 147.