Festschrift für Fritz W. Scharpf - MPIfG

V. Schmidt · The Boundaries of “Bounded Generalizations” 321
1 The Mediating Factors in Actor-Centered
Institutionalism
In explaining policy change, actor-centered institutionalism identifies a
number of mediating factors affecting actors’ capacity to solve policy problems.
While some of these factors form the background conditions to
change, mainly the problems that establish the need for change and the policy
legacies that make the problems greater or lesser challenges, others
serve to drive change. These are the perceptions, preferences, and capabilities
that constitute actors’ rationally reconstructed attributes, and their institutional
interactions, consisting of the strategic modes of interaction of
actor constellations in given institutional settings. To account fully for
problem-solving capacity, however, another factor is essential: discourse,
encompassing the ideas and communicative actions that drive change in
perceptions, preferences, and strategies in institutional interactions.
1.1 Policy Problems
The first background factor consists of the problems that may expose a
country to greater than usual risk, that is, the problems that may challenge
the existing state of affairs. In the political economic sphere, this factor can
be identified as economic vulnerability, whether to the spillover effects of
the oil crisis in the l970s, to the increasing pressures of global competition
in the capital and product markets from the l980s on, or to the demographic
shifts that put pressure on all social security systems by the l990s (Scharpf
2000a). But in the environmental arena, the problems are instead exposure
to environmental hazards, such as the thinning of the ozone layer; while in
defense and security, it is vulnerability to military incursions or (recently)
terrorist threats.
For the polity, the problems may spill over from the policy solutions, for
example, when EU policies related to the free movement of goods threaten
the strict alcohol policies that reflect long-held values about citizenship and
(sober) society in Scandinavia (Kurzer 2001). But the polity problems may
instead stem directly from institutions that challenge the legitimacy of national
democratic governance practices. In the EU, the problems come from
the decision-rules that can present obstacles to “positive integration” when
member-states’ preferences are divided (Scharpf 1996, 1999) as well as