Festschrift für Fritz W. Scharpf - MPIfG

V. Schmidt · The Boundaries of “Bounded Generalizations” 325
their membership and the scope of their accepted and expected range of activities
and powers, facilitates and constrains their range of choices, and influences
how they evaluate the outcomes achieved by their choices. In short,
the institutional setting shapes actors’ preferences and perceptions (Scharpf
1997: 38–40) while defining actor constellations and actors’ range of modes
of interaction.
There is no room here, nor need, to go into the details of the game-theoretically
elucidated strategic institutional interactions that are so well analyzed
in Games Real Actors Play and so well illustrated in Scharpf’s more
empirical work on democratic governance (e.g., Scharpf 1996, 1999) or political
economy (e.g., Scharpf 1990, 2000a). Suffice to say here that Scharpf
identifies the “games real actors play” by providing modular constructs that
represent incomplete theories linking actor constellations and modes of interaction
in particular institutional settings, against a background of a given
set of policy problems, legacies, and actor attributes. These have a rational
choice flavor where they can be linked analytically; but many can only be
linked through narrative connections between partial theories which provide
empirical as well as analytic support (Scharpf 1997: 32). These games serve
as tools for analysis which seek to predict how real actors in given institutional
settings would respond to a challenge if they followed strategic logic.
When they do, the explanation stops here. When they don’t, the explanation
points to where one needs to search for other explanatory factors.
With these tools, Scharpf has been highly successful in providing gametheoretic
analyses of a wide range of policy problems that “real actors” have
sought to solve. He has demonstrated that whereas the EU has high problem-solving
capacity in cases of “negative integration,” where it engages in
market-making by following the deregulatory logic of the Treaties, it has
comparatively little in “positive integration,” because the attempt to correct
market failures, whether in terms of fiscal policy or social policy, is stymied
by EU decision rules that create joint-decision traps where actors’ preferences
differ (Scharpf 1996, 1999). Moreover, Scharpf’s analytic framework
has also enabled him to explain the vast array of changes (or lack thereof) in
the welfare state. Thus, for example, he has explained the problem-solving
capacity of the Netherlands beginning in the early l980s by contrast with
other multi-actor Continental welfare states at the same time, such as Belgium,
largely in terms of Dutch actors’ new orientations – the unions’ willingness
to allow capital a higher level of profit in return for more jobs – and
renewed modes of interaction – a return to cooperative corporatist negotiation
between the social partners that brought greater labor flexibility and