Abstract

Abstract This chapter addresses the challenge of explaining institutional change, asking whether the much-criticized rational-choice perspective can contribute to the understanding of institutional change in political science. It discusses the methodological reasons why rational-choice institutionalism (RCI) often assumes that institutional change is exogenous and discontinuous, and identifies and explores the possible pathways along which RCI can be extended to be more useful in understanding institutional change in political science. Finally, the Chapter reflects on what RCI theorizing would look like if it started to take endogenous change seriously: by giving up some of its simplifying assumptions, RCI can be a useful tool for analyzing institutional change, but choosing this path has consequences for the generality of the models in RCI as well as for the style of its theorizing.

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