Festschrift für Fritz W. Scharpf - MPIfG

320 V · Erklärung und Verallgemeinerung
the factors at the core of actor-centered institutionalism, enabling Scharpf to
use game-theory to develop bounded generalizations about the outcomes of
actors’ institutionally-constituted strategic interactions that apply in a wide
variety of institutional contexts (Scharpf 1997).
But while these bounded generalizations of strategic institutional interactions
can take us very far indeed in explaining and even predicting policy
outcomes, they often cannot account for actual outcomes. This is because
such generalizations assume that actors by definition know what they want,
know what other actors want, pursue what they want, and know how to get
it within any given institutional context. In actuality, however, actors’ purposes,
preferences, and perceptions are not always clear and in any case can
and often do change in the course of interaction. This means that they
sometimes solve problems predicted as strategically unsolvable and other
times unravel solutions predicted as strategically unproblematic. To explain
this, we require yet another factor: discourse. Discursive institutional interactions
may change perceptions of problems and legacies, influence preferences,
and thereby enhance or undermine actors’ problem-solving capacity
even where actor constellations and modes of interaction in given institutional
settings seemingly disallow this (Schmidt 2001b). I emphasize the
“may,” here, because discourse sometimes exerts a causal influence in policy
change, sometimes not, therefore making it essential to outline the conditions
under which discourse matters and when it does not (see Schmidt
2001a, 2002a).
This essay, in short, can more generally be seen as an attempt to explore
the boundaries of Scharpf’s actor-centered version of rational choice institutionalism,
by seeing where it ends and discursive institutionalism begins.
But it is also a way into considering his contributions to political economic
and democratic theory, by examining not only his analysis of policy change
but also his substantive accounts of its effects on the polity and economy.
All in all, rather than calling this chapter a critique, I would like to think that
it would serve as a complement (or even compliment) to Fritz W. Scharpf’s
actor-centered institutionalism, by adding another “tool” to the explanatory
tool set.