Interpretive, Psychological and New Institutional Approaches

Comparative Politics: nature and major approaches; political economy and political sociology perspectives; limitations of the comparative method.

This article covers the approaches that displaced the developmental frameworks — the interpretive turn, the psychological approach, new institutionalism and rational choice — each of which explains political outcomes by something the systems and functional models could not see.

Official Syllabus: Paper II, Section A, Unit 1

Every approach in comparative politics is an answer to one question: what is the thing that actually explains why politics turns out as it does?

The systems and structural-functional models answered functions. Political economy answers class and production. Political sociology answers cleavage and group. The three approaches in this article answer very differently — and between them they account for most of what comparative politics has done since the developmental frameworks collapsed.

The interpretive approach answers meanings. Political action is not a movement of bodies that happens to have a meaning attached; it is constituted by what the actors take themselves to be doing. Measuring behaviour from outside therefore measures the wrong object. A vote in Bihar and a vote in Bavaria are the same physical act and, quite possibly, two different political acts.

The psychological approach answers dispositions. Institutions do not act; people inside them do, and those people carry personalities, identities, prejudices and cognitive shortcuts that determine what the institution actually produces. This is the only approach that can explain why identical structures generate different behaviour.

New institutionalism answers rules — but not the formal rules the old institutionalists studied. It means the whole structure of formal rules, informal norms and standard operating procedures that shape what actors want as well as what they can get. Its rise was so complete that the field acquired a slogan for it: we are all institutionalists now.

None of the three is a refinement of the systems model. Each locates the explanatory action somewhere the systems model had no category for, which is precisely why they survived it.

The Interpretive Approach

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What it claims

• Instead of trying only to understand political action and its consequences, the interpretive approach tries to understand the reasons, intentions, beliefs and logical progression of individuals that ultimately shape political action.
• It contrasts directly with structural and institutional approaches, which focus on objective systems and measurable factors, and with positivist methodology generally.
• The claim is ontological, not merely methodological, and everything turns on this distinction.
  • The weak version — that qualitative evidence is useful, that context matters, that numbers miss nuance — is a claim about method that any positivist can accept.
  • The strong version is that meanings constitute the action. A raised hand is a vote only because a set of shared understandings makes it one. Strip out the meaning and there is no political act left to measure — which makes external measurement not merely incomplete but directed at the wrong object.
• The approach holds that political realities are not objective truths but are constructed through social interactions, language and shared understandings.
• It insists on contextual analysis — the historical, cultural and institutional settings, the traditions, narratives and discourses that shape what actors can intelligibly do.

The intellectual ancestry

• Max Weber supplied the founding concept: verstehen, interpretive understanding — the requirement that social explanation grasp the subjective meaning the actor attaches to their own conduct. Weber’s own comparative sociology of religion is interpretive comparative politics before the term existed.
• Peter Winch, in The Idea of a Social Science, made the sharpest version of the argument: social action is rule-following, and rules are internal to a form of life. To understand an action is to grasp the rule it follows, which cannot be done from outside that form of life.
• Clifford Geertz supplied the method with thick description — an account dense enough to convey what an act means to those performing it. His illustration is definitive: a twitch and a wink are physically identical and are not the same act, and no amount of measurement of the eyelid distinguishes them.
• Idealists — Michael Oakeshott and R. G. Collingwood — supply the emphasis on tradition as the medium within which political action is intelligible, and Collingwood’s insistence that historical explanation means re-enacting the thought of the agent.
• Post-modernists, above all Michel Foucault, contribute the questioning of modernism’s claim to be the peak of human knowledge, and the analysis of discourse as constituting the objects it appears merely to describe.
• Charles Taylor’s argument that human beings are self-interpreting animals completes the case: since our self-understandings partly constitute what we are, a social science that brackets them is studying something other than human beings.

Bevir and Rhodes and the decentred approach

• Mark Bevir and R. A. W. Rhodes produced the most fully worked-out interpretivism in contemporary political science, and it is the version that turned a philosophical position into a research programme.
• Actions and practices are intrinsically meaningful; they embody the beliefs of the actors. Beliefs are not directly observable but are inferred to explain why people act as they do, and beliefs and practices are interconnected rather than separate.
• Traditions are the starting point of any individual’s beliefs — dynamic sets of beliefs people inherit and then adapt for reasons of their own. A tradition is not a fixed category but a moving inheritance.
• Dilemmas explain how traditions change. When an inherited belief runs into a new circumstance it cannot accommodate, the actor faces a dilemma and modifies the tradition creatively to resolve it. This is where the approach gets its account of change, which is precisely what institutionalism struggles to supply.
• Webs of belief replace isolated variables: actions emerge from interconnected networks of belief rather than from single factors or discrete rational calculations.
• Situated agency is the resolution of the structure–agency problem. Actors are neither autonomous choosers nor products of structure; they act for their own reasons, but always from within an inherited tradition.
• Decentred theory is the payoff for comparative work. It decentres governance, highlighting the diversity and contingency of the meaningful activity that constitutes rule — rejecting the grand narrative that governance has a single logic anywhere, let alone the same one everywhere.
• The methods follow: detailed ethnography to recover beliefs in action, and historical genealogy of how those beliefs arose. Their later work on how officials use stories to make sense of their world treats organisational narrative as institutional memory and justification.

What interpretivism does in comparative politics

• It attacks the equivalence problem at its root. The standing danger of comparison is assuming that an institution with the same name does the same work in different places. Interpretive work is the systematic demonstration that it does not — that an election, a court, a bureaucracy or a party means something different where the surrounding web of belief differs.
• Applied comparatively it produces close ethnographic study of how democracy, corruption, citizenship, secularism or the rule of law are actually understood in particular societies, rather than how they score on an index built elsewhere.
  • The concept of corruption is the clearest case. What a cross-national index records as a single variable may be, in one setting, the violation of an impersonal norm and, in another, the fulfilment of an obligation to kin that the state’s rules never displaced. The index reports one number for two different phenomena.
• It thereby supplies the answer to conceptual stretching from the inside: instead of thinning a concept until it travels, it asks what the concept actually means where it is being applied.
• The Indian ethnography of the state is the field’s strongest body of interpretive comparative work.
  • Akhil Gupta’s Red Tape reads Indian bureaucracy through the writing, filing and circulation of documents, showing that the state is encountered by most citizens not as an institution but as a set of practices, papers and petty officials — and that structural violence is produced by the ordinary functioning of welfare administration rather than by its failure.
  • James Scott’s work on Southeast Asia is not Indian material but is used comparatively across South Asian scholarship. Weapons of the Weak, a study of a Malaysian village, recovers the moral economy of peasant societies and the everyday, undramatic forms of resistance — foot-dragging, evasion, pilfering — that no measure of political participation registers; Seeing Like a State shows how state schemes fail when they impose legibility on knowledge they cannot read.
  • Veena Das on how communities narrate and absorb collective violence, and Partha Chatterjee’s distinction between civil society and political society — the latter being the negotiated, extra-legal domain through which most Indians actually deal with the state — are interpretive contributions that have entered general comparative theory.

Limitations

• Limited generalisability. Because the approach focuses on specific contexts and meanings, findings do not travel easily. If meanings are local, comparison across them is hard to justify — which is an unusually direct problem for an approach offered as a contribution to comparative politics.
• Challenges to objectivity. The emphasis on subjective interpretation raises questions about researcher bias and about the replicability of studies. Two interpreters may produce two defensible and incompatible readings, and there is no agreed procedure for choosing between them.
• Complexity and cost. Recovering nuanced meanings requires extensive, in-depth, long-duration research, which limits the number of cases any one scholar can handle — and comparison needs more than one case.
• It abandons prediction, and does so deliberately, which puts it outside what much of the discipline understands its purpose to be.
• The relativism problem. If every political order must be understood in its own terms, the ground for criticising any of them becomes unclear — a difficulty interpretivists answer by distinguishing understanding from endorsement, but which the approach cannot fully escape.
• The reply is worth stating too. Interpretivists hold that positivist comparison does not avoid these problems but conceals them: its categories are also interpretations, merely uninspected ones, and its apparent objectivity is the interpretation of the researcher’s own culture presented as a measuring rod.

Interpretivism’s claim is not that numbers are inadequate but that they answer a question about eyelids when the question was about winking.

The Psychological Approach

The claim

• The psychological approach holds that political outcomes run through individual dispositions — personality, socialisation, belief systems, emotion and cognition — and that institutional accounts leave out the causal step that actually does the work.
• Its strength is a specific one: it addresses what institutional accounts cannot, namely why identical structures generate different behaviour. Two states with the same constitution, the same electoral rule and the same party law produce different politics, and the psychological approach is the only one that looks inside the actor for the difference.
• Its ancestry lies with the founders of behaviouralism, who were psychologists in temper before they were methodologists.

The founders

• Graham Wallas, in Human Nature in Politics, rejected the utilitarian portrait of the rational self-interested individual and insisted that human nature is too complex to be explained by simplistic utilitarian propositions. His advocacy of psychology in political inquiry is the origin of the empirical study of political behaviour.
  • He warned against politicians assuming rationality in voters, compared political persuasion to the marketing of toothpaste, breakfast cereals and hosiery, and observed that such marketing creates captive human beings with false senses of need, security and insecurity.
• Walter Lippmann agreed with Wallas and made the point sharper in Public Opinion: people act not on the world but on the pictures in their heads — a pseudo-environment assembled from stereotypes, because the real environment is too large and too complex to be known directly.
  • His conclusion, that human beings are driven by self-interest and are not angels but have the capacity for virtue, and his consequent scepticism about mass democratic competence, is the ancestor of every later argument about misinformation and the manufacture of consent.
• Harold Lasswell built the first systematic psychological theory of politics in Psychopathology and Politics, and his formula is the one to know: private motives are displaced onto public objects and rationalised in terms of the public interest.
  • The political man is one who displaces personal need onto the political arena and then experiences that displacement as public service — an account that is deliberately unflattering and remarkably difficult to disprove.
  • His typology of the agitator, the administrator and the theorist classifies political actors by the psychological function politics performs for them, and Politics: Who Gets What, When, How made the empirical study of power the organising question of the discipline.

The authoritarian personality

• Theodor Adorno and colleagues at Berkeley produced The Authoritarian Personality, the single most influential and most attacked work in political psychology, written to answer the question of how a modern society had produced fascism.
• It proposed a syndrome — a coherent personality structure combining rigidity of thought, conventionalism, submission to in-group authority, aggression towards out-groups, superstition, preoccupation with power and toughness, and projectivity — held to originate in a harsh, hierarchical family upbringing.
• The F-scale was constructed to measure implicit authoritarian predisposition without asking about fascism directly, alongside scales for ethnocentrism, anti-Semitism and political-economic conservatism.
• The methodological criticism was severe and largely justified.
  • Every F-scale item was worded so that agreement indicated authoritarianism, so the instrument could not distinguish authoritarianism from acquiescence bias — the tendency of some respondents to agree with any statement.
  • The sample was unrepresentative, the clinical interviews were not blind, and the psychoanalytic theory behind the construct was not independently testable.
  • Most damagingly for a study of fascism, the design treated authoritarianism as a phenomenon of the political right by construction, and could not detect its left-wing forms.
• The construct survived the instrument.Bob Altemeyer’sright-wing authoritarianism scale rebuilt it on sounder psychometrics around three clusters — authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression and conventionalism — and Sidanius and Pratto’ssocial dominance orientation identified a distinct disposition towards group-based hierarchy.
  • Both are now standard instruments in comparative survey research, and both have been central to explaining the cross-national appeal of authoritarian populism since 2015.

The cognitive turn

• Philip Converse’s The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics is the founding empirical finding: most citizens do not hold ideologically constrained belief systems, and many survey responses are non-attitudes — answers manufactured on the spot rather than reported from a stable preference.
• Kahneman and Tversky’s work on heuristics and biases supplied the general machinery, and its political applications are direct: availability, anchoring, loss aversion and framing all shape political judgment in predictable ways.
• Motivated reasoning is the most politically consequential finding. Taber and Lodge demonstrated that people process political information to reach conclusions they already prefer — engaging in disconfirmation bias against uncongenial evidence and confirmation bias for congenial evidence.
  • The corollary is disturbing for democratic theory: the politically sophisticated are more susceptible, not less, because they have more resources with which to counter-argue what they do not wish to believe. More information does not converge opinion; it polarises it.
• Framing research, associated with Iyengar, shows that how an issue is presented — episodic or thematic — determines whether audiences attribute responsibility to individuals or to society, which converts a presentational choice into a political one.
• Zaller’s receive–accept–sample model integrates the findings: opinions are constructed at the moment of asking from whatever considerations are accessible, and elite discourse determines what is accessible — which is why mass opinion tracks elite polarisation rather than the reverse.

The affective turn

• The most important recent development is the recognition that partisanship is a social identity rather than a policy position. Green, Palmquist and Schickler showed that party attachment behaves like religious or ethnic identity — acquired early, durable, and largely resistant to disconfirming policy evidence.
• Achen and Bartels, in Democracy for Realists, drew the conclusion for democratic theory: voters do not choose parties because of policies; they adopt policies because of parties. The folk theory of democracy, in which informed citizens select representatives on the merits, does not describe any electorate that has been measured.
• Affective polarisation — dislike and distrust of partisan out-groups, as distinct from disagreement with their policies — is now among the most researched topics in the discipline, with Iyengar, Sood and Lelkes the originating citation.
  • The distinction is essential and frequently missed: ideological polarisation is disagreement about policy; affective polarisation is hostility towards people. The two are separable, and the second has risen far faster than the first in most measured democracies.
  • Recent research has extended the concept comparatively into multi-party systems, where the simple in-party/out-party distinction does not apply, developed new cross-nationally comparable measures, and examined gendered patterns of partisan hostility.
  • The finding matters for comparative politics because affective polarisation predicts tolerance for democratic violation. Voters who regard the other side as an enemy rather than an opponent will accept anti-democratic behaviour by their own side, which is the psychological mechanism underlying democratic backsliding — the missing causal step between institutional design and institutional erosion.

Limitations

• The aggregation problem is the fundamental objection. Individual dispositions do not straightforwardly sum to institutional outcomes. A country is not a large person, and the step from a distribution of personality traits to a regime outcome is exactly the step the approach has never satisfactorily made.
• Reductionism. Explaining politics by psychology risks dissolving structure, interest and power into individual disposition, and treating a political conflict as a psychological condition.
• The methodological defects of the early studies were serious, and the field’s most-cited work remains its most criticised.
• Sampling bias is severe and comparatively disabling. A great deal of political psychology rests on WEIRD samples — Western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic, and frequently undergraduate — and generalising from these to the world is precisely the error comparative politics exists to prevent.
• The ecological fallacy runs in both directions: individual-level findings do not license claims about societies, and aggregate patterns do not license claims about individuals.
• It has no account of institutions, and its findings are compatible with almost any institutional configuration, which makes it a supplement to comparative explanation rather than a substitute for one.

New Institutionalism

Why the state and its rules came back

• The 1970s inaugurated the period of new institutionalism, which remains the dominant mode, and the field’s own slogan — we are all institutionalists now — is the standard marker of its ascendancy.
• Skocpol’s Bringing the State Back In re-established the state as a relevant actor in its own right, with autonomous interests, rather than as an arena in which social forces contend or a system that converts inputs.
• March and Olsen supplied the theoretical statement: institutions have a major determining effect on individual behaviour — they do not merely aggregate given preferences but shape what actors want.
• Their central distinction is the one to have exactly.
  • The logic of consequences — actors calculate expected outcomes and choose what maximises their interest. This is the rational-choice account.
  • The logic of appropriateness — actors ask what a person in my role, in this situation, is supposed to do, and follow the rule. Most of the time, most people in institutions are following rules rather than calculating outcomes, and this is why institutions persist through changes of personnel and interest.
• What distinguishes new from old institutionalism is essential and frequently missed.
  • The old institutionalism studied formal rules, described legally and normatively, and treated institutions as the framework within which politics happens.
  • The new institutionalism studies formal rules, informal norms, conventions and standard operating procedures together, treats them empirically and comparatively, and argues that institutions shape preferences and identities rather than merely constraining behaviour.

The three variants

Hall and Taylor’s distinction between three institutionalisms is the standard map of the field.

• Historical institutionalism contributes path dependence — the argument that early choices constrain later ones through increasing returns, so that the sequence in which things happen changes the outcome, not merely the things themselves. Pierson’s work on increasing returns in politics is its clearest statement, and critical junctures are the moments at which paths are set.
• Rational choice institutionalism contributes Douglass North’s definition — institutions are the rules of the game in a society, the humanly devised constraints that shape interaction — and the analysis of institutions as solutions to collective-action and commitment problems by reducing transaction costs.
• Sociological institutionalism contributes institutional isomorphism: organisations across very different settings converge on similar forms not because those forms are efficient but because they are legitimate. DiMaggio and Powell distinguish coercive, mimetic and normative isomorphism, and the concept explains a great deal about why post-colonial states adopted institutions that did not work — including central banks, planning commissions and anti-corruption bodies replicated for legitimacy rather than for function.
• Discursive institutionalism, associated with Vivien Schmidt, is often added as a fourth: institutions are carried and changed through ideas and the discourse about them, which supplies the theory of change the other three lack. It is the point at which new institutionalism meets the interpretive approach.

Institutions and development: the programme that won the Nobel

• The most consequential recent institutionalist work is Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson’s account of why some nations are rich and others poor, for which the three were awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2024.
• The core distinction is between two institutional types:
  • Inclusive institutions — secure property rights, impartial law, open entry to economic activity, and broad distribution of political power. These generate incentives to invest and innovate, and therefore sustained growth.
  • Extractive institutions — designed to transfer resources from the many to a narrow elite, with power concentrated and entry restricted. They can produce growth in bursts, as the Soviet Union and contemporary China have, but not sustained innovation, because innovation is creative destruction and an extractive elite has every reason to block it.
• Their empirical strategy is the colonial-origins argument: where European settlement was feasible, settlers built inclusive institutions; where mortality was high, they built extractive ones for resource extraction, and those institutions persisted long after the colonisers left.
  • The reversal of fortune finding is its most striking result: the regions that were richest in 1500 are among the poorest today, because prosperity attracted extraction while sparsely populated regions received settler institutions.
  • The argument is completed by the claim that political institutions determine economic ones — that the distribution of power decides whose property is secure — which places politics rather than economics at the causal centre of development.
• The criticism is substantial and belongs in any account of the argument.
  • Jeffrey Sachs and others argue that geography, disease environment and agricultural endowment do the causal work the institutional variables are credited with.
  • Ha-Joon Chang points out that today’s rich countries developed under institutions that were themselves extractive by current standards, and are now kicking away the ladder by prescribing to poor countries institutions they never used themselves.
  • The settler-mortality instrument has been challenged on data quality, and the endogeneity problem is not fully resolved: prosperous societies can afford good institutions, so the correlation is consistent with causation in either direction.
  • China is the standing empirical difficulty, as it was for modernisation theory: four decades of growth under institutions the framework classifies as extractive.
• Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to receive the economics Nobel, established that the two-way choice between state and market is false. Governing the Commons documented communities that manage common-pool resources sustainably through self-governing institutions neither privatised nor state-run, and derived eight design principles from cases including Nepali irrigation, Swiss alpine pasture and Japanese village forests.
  • Her concept of polycentric governance — many overlapping decision centres rather than one — is now central to comparative work on federalism, environmental governance and local self-government.

Limitations

• The theory of change is weak, and this is the standard objection. An approach built to explain persistence explains transformation badly, and critical juncture risks becoming a label for whatever happened rather than an account of why.
• Endogeneity is pervasive. Institutions shape outcomes and are shaped by them, and disentangling the two is the central methodological difficulty of the entire programme.
• Informal institutions are under-theorised relative to their importance. Helmke and Levitsky’s typology — complementary, accommodating, competing and substitutive — is the corrective, and it matters most exactly where formal institutions are weakest.
• The functionalist temptation returns. Explaining an institution by the problem it solves reproduces the circularity that discredited structural-functionalism.
• The normative loading of inclusive and extractive does the same work that modern and traditional did for the previous generation, and invites the same objection.

Rational Choice

• Rational choice entered comparative politics from economics, modelling political actors as utility-maximisers under institutional constraint, and its achievements are real and durable.
  • Anthony Downs’s An Economic Theory of Democracy derived the convergence of parties on the median voter and the concept of rational ignorance — that it is individually rational not to inform oneself, because one vote will not decide anything.
  • Mancur Olson’s The Logic of Collective Action produced the field’s most counter-intuitive and most fertile finding: individuals with a common interest will not act to advance it, because each gains from the outcome whether or not they contribute. Small, concentrated groups therefore organise and large, diffuse ones do not — which explains a great deal about why producers beat consumers in every political system that has been examined.
  • William Riker’s minimum winning coalition theorem, Kenneth Arrow’s impossibility theorem, and Buchanan and Tullock’s public choice analysis complete the classical apparatus.
• The standing objections are about motivation and preference.
  • The motivational account is thin. Actors are assumed to maximise a given utility, and where the utility function is inferred from the behaviour it explains, the theory becomes unfalsifiable.
  • Preferences are taken as given and never explained, which cedes to sociology and psychology the question of where political wants come from — and that question is most of comparative politics.
  • Its predictive record outside institutionally dense settings is poor, and the paradox of voting — that on its own terms nobody should vote, and most people do — remains the standard illustration.
  • It is culture-blind by design, which is why it travels well between legislatures and badly between civilisations.

Comparing the Four

The Indian Context

• Interpretive work on India is the field’s richest, precisely because the gap between the constitutional text and the encountered state is so wide.
  • The Indian citizen’s actual experience of the state — through Gupta’s files and petty officials, Chatterjee’s political society, and the negotiated, partly extra-legal channels through which entitlements are claimed — is invisible to any measure of institutional quality, and is what the interpretive approach exists to recover.
  • The same constitutional apparatus means something different across the country, which is exactly the interpretivist prediction and exactly what a national governance index cannot register.
• The psychological approach has a strong Indian empirical base through the National Election Studies, which have measured political efficacy, trust, and communal and caste attitudes over half a century.
  • Affective polarisation is now a live Indian research question, and the transmission mechanism — encrypted messaging, peer-to-peer forwarding, low editorial mediation — differs enough from the broadcast environments where the theory was built to make India a genuinely testing case.
  • Ashis Nandy’s psychological readings of colonialism and of Hindu nationalism are the most distinctively Indian contribution to political psychology, arguing that colonialism operated on the coloniser’s mind as much as the colonised’s — a claim that no Western political psychology had made.
• New institutionalism fits the Indian case unusually well, and India returns the favour.
  • The basic structure doctrine is an institution created by an institution to protect institutions — the Supreme Court’s assertion in Kesavananda Bharati of an unamendable core is one of the world’s most consequential examples of institutional self-entrenchment, and it has been borrowed by courts in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Kenya and Colombia. This is sociological isomorphism running from the periphery to elsewhere in the periphery.
  • Path dependence describes the durability of the colonial administrative apparatus: the district collector, the police act’s descendants and the all-India services were inherited rather than designed, and each attempt to reform them has run into increasing returns to the existing arrangement.
  • The Election Commission under Article 324 is the clearest Indian instance of institutional autonomy in the new-institutionalist sense — its authority built as much from convention, assertion and public expectation as from statute, which is why disputes over its appointment process are disputes about institutional autonomy rather than about procedure.
  • Ostrom’s design principles were derived partly from South Asian irrigation systems, and Indian joint forest management and water user associations are among the most studied commons institutions in the world.
• Atul Kohli’s work joins the three approaches: he explains India’s democratic durability by institutional capacity, its governability crisis by institutional decay, and its uneven developmental record by variation in state–business relations across Indian states — comparative institutionalism conducted sub-nationally.

Contemporary Relevance

• These three approaches have converged on the same question from different directions: why do democracies erode?
  • The institutionalist answer is that formal rules can be hollowed while preserved — that executive aggrandisement proceeds through legal steps, each defensible, whose cumulative effect is not.
  • The psychological answer is that affective polarisation makes voters willing to tolerate that hollowing when their own side does it, which supplies the demand side the institutional account lacks.
  • The interpretive answer is that the meaning of democratic institutions changes before their form does — that an election can retain every procedural feature and cease to be understood by its participants as a genuine contest.
• Together they compose the most complete explanation of backsliding the discipline has, and the fact that it requires all three is itself an argument against approach monism.
• The interpretive approach has been strengthened by the failure of measurement. As indices multiply and disagree, the question of what exactly is being measured has become urgent rather than philosophical, and the revival of area studies within comparative politics is interpretivism entering by the methodological door.
• The psychological approach has been transformed by data availability. Digital trace data, large-scale online experiments and cross-national panels have made testable what was previously speculative — and have simultaneously raised the ethical and generalisability problems that come with studying people through the platforms shaping their beliefs.

Conclusion

These approaches are usually presented as rivals, and they are better understood as answers to different questions that a full explanation needs all of. An institution’s rules determine what actors can do; their psychology determines what they want to do; the meanings they hold determine what they take themselves to be doing at all. A comparative account that has only one of these is not wrong so much as incomplete in a predictable direction.

What each supplies is also what each lacks. Interpretivism recovers meaning and cannot generalise; psychology explains the actor and cannot aggregate; institutionalism explains persistence and struggles with change; rational choice models strategy on preferences it cannot account for. The pairings are obvious and increasingly common in practice — institutional analysis with process tracing of actors’ beliefs, experimental psychology embedded in comparative institutional designs, discursive institutionalism as the meeting point of rules and meanings.

That the 2024 and 2025 papers turned to the interpretive and psychological approaches is a fair reflection of where the discipline’s energy has moved. After seventy years of trying to explain politics by structures, the field has gone looking for the people inside them.