Actors, institutions and ideas Flashcards
What is the structure-agency debate?
Can socially situated actors be agents and act autonomously from wider systems and structures?
How much ‘free will’ do we really have?
What are the agent-centric approaches?
- Voluntarism
- Intentionalism
Individuals and their interests are key to understand and explain social reality.
How do agent-centric theories differ in explaining what determines interests?
- Individual rationality
- Utility maximisation
- Group affiliation
- Cultural patterns
How does rational choice theory determine why people make decisions?
- Individuals choose the action that best satisfies their desires, given their beliefs.
- Beliefs are based on the best available evidence to the individual
- Individual will invest the appropriate amount of resources to carry out the action
Whlie the choice may be rational, the desires/interests/beliefs might not be.
What are the structure-centric approaches?
- Structural determinism
- Marxism
- Structuration theory
How is rational choice theory critiqued?
- Where do interests/preferences come from?
- What are our ‘real’ interests? (Are they material or socially constructed?)
- Reducing political action to interests can be too reductive and over simplifies complex actions
- Where are social forces included?
What is structural determinism?
World made of three structured levels:
* political
* economic
* ideological
All of these levels are in crisis which leads global society to revolution.
What is structuration theory?
Structures provide:
* constraints on human agency, limiting choices
* preconditions for human agency, making actions possible
Why are structures not neutral?
They act as a filter to privilege certain actors/groups.
How do structural approaches differ?
How far they determine structures.
Specific, formal political institutions vs. norms, rules or conventions.
What is historical insitutionalism?
Via selective bias, institutions can become self-reproducing - earlier made decisions can lock institutions into patterns and make them hard to change.
What is path dependency in historical institutionalism?
How past events and structures create constraints on future events and structures.
What are the critiques of institutionalism?
- It explains continuity better than it explains change
- Change often seen as resulting from exogenous crises, not internal issues and problems
How does institutionalism view ideas?
- Subjective beliefs (filter through which info is elaborated)
- Tools (Discourse and conscious use of ideas)
- Institutional frameworks (constrain or indicate courses of action)
What is the problem of ideas in political science?
- Not very good at explaining how they work
- Not good at defining what they are/variety
How can an event like Brexit be explained?
- Ideas
- Actors
- Structures
How can Brexit be explained through ideas?
- Taking back control / national sovereignty
- Democracy - people have spoken
How can Brexit be explained through actors?
Brexit as interepreted differently by each actor
How can Brexit be explained by structures?
Party political: sought to end internal Cons. political debates
What are the notable features of historical institutionalism?
- relationship between institutions ∧ group behaviour is broad
- asymmetries of power between institutions, ∧ each group ≠.
- path dependency
- institutions ≠ only causal force in politics
Why is the relationship between institutions ∧ group behaviour v/ broad in historical institutionalism?
Differences in approach between ‘calculus’ and ‘cultural’.
‘calculus’
* human behaviour based on strategic calc.
* institutions alter actor’s expectations
‘cultural’
* human behaviour bounded by worldview
* institutions provide cognitive templates for interpretation ∧ desires
Where did rational choice institutionalism arise from?
US congress instability
What impacts did the institutions within congress have on its members?
Structures choices ∧ info. to its’ members.
What are the notable features of rational choice institutionalism?
- actors have a fixed set of preferences / tastes
- politics is many collective action dilemmas where individuals look to self-maximise ∴ = socially suboptimal outcomes
- behavious driven by strategic calculus, not historical forces
- institutions are replaced if there is another institution that provides more benefits to actors
