Festschrift für Fritz W. Scharpf - MPIfG

324 V · Erklärung und Verallgemeinerung
contrast with Scandinavian welfare states which privilege highly generous
benefits for all to ensure equality (Esping-Andersen 1990).
For actor-centered institutionalism, however, one cannot stop at the societally-constructed
understanding of actors’ orientations because, as Scharpf
goes on to insist in the second part of the very same sentence quoted above,
rational choice will nevertheless yield results when resorting to “institutionspecific
information for the specification of actor capabilities, cognition,
and preferences,” that is, when the interest and culture-based understandings
of actors’ orientations are examined in the context of the institutional interactions
which are at the core of actor-centered institutionalism (Scharpf
1997: 21–22). The institutional interactions consist of three variables that
are the key to explaining actors’ strategic problem-solving capacity once the
policy problems and legacies have been identified and actors’ perceptions,
preferences, and capabilities have been defined.
1.4 Institutional Interactions
This second set of driving factors consists of the strategic modes of interaction
of actor constellations in given institutional settings. The modes of interaction
run the gamut from unilateral action through negotiated agreement
and majority vote to hierarchical direction. As such, they describe at a highly
abstract level the range of interrelationships likely among constellations of
composite actors in institutional settings – for example, “single-actor” constellations
where power is concentrated in one dominant actor capable of hierarchical
direction of the other actors in the constellation or “multi-actor”
constellations where power is more dispersed and interactions are through
negotiated agreement because certain actors in the constellation have veto
capabilities (Scharpf 1997, 2001; see also Tsebelis l995).
The institutional settings at their most general level range from anarchic
fields and minimal institutions; networks, regimes and joint-decision systems;
associations, constituencies, and representative assembles; to hierarchical
organizations and the state. But more concretely they consist of the
vast range of formal and informal rules that actors follow in the context of
any interaction, and therefore not just the legal rules but also the social and
political norms, conventions, expectations, and values which vary across
countries and time (Scharpf 1997: 41). The institutional setting not only
identifies the common frame of reference for composite actors and sets their
purposes and values, it constitutes those actors in the sense that it defines