Political Institutions: The Script Not the Play

UNIVERSITY committees move in ways of their own, and for reasons that must have seemed good to them at the time the subject we teach was given many titles. We have departments of Government, Politics, Political Science, Political Studies and, in my case, Political Theory and Institutions. What the significance of that division was I do not know, but it makes a convenient opening. It seems to me that while political scientists have battled in the field of Theory, empirical, analytical and ideological, the field of Institutions has become something of an intellectual backwater, still the focus of much research but not the centre of theoretical debate. The institutionalists, to pin a label on that group unasked, generally take the meaning of the word for granted. The moderns, students of behaviour in one form or another, prefer to avoid it if they can. There has thus been remarkably little recent discussion of the concept of institutions in political science and, as a result, the word has often been used in a muddled way. A look at the terminology and its implications is one purpose of this essay. But my real purpose is more specific. As befits the holder of a chair of Political Theory and Institutions I want to emphasize the link between the two parts of my domain, to argue for a view of political institutions as the embodiment of political thought. Institutions are often studied as if they were a form of practice, part of behavioural reality if you will. I prefer to see them as constructs with a purpose, ideas about government translated into formal arrangements that probably do not coincide with practice-a different level of reality but no less real for that. I have argued elsewhere’ the importance of an institutional approach to the study of politics. We organize our government through formal institutions, not by informal agreements on how to behave, and to make our government better, to improve its behaviour and ours, requires the reform of institutions. This, in turn, is meaningless without reference to political theory, for reform means purpose and purpose means philosophy. Unless we think of political institutions as the formalization of values, as legal arrangements designed to shape behaviour, instead of confusing them with behaviour itself, we are likely to emasculate political science.