Is unified institutional economics possible?

Abstract

In recent years, some papers were published with the aim to integrate the original institutional economics and new institutional economics. This paper considers the possibility to solve this problem. To do this, it has analyzed four tasks: firstly, how do the original institutionalists characterize their scientific program specificity; secondly, how do the original institutionalists criticize new institutional economics; thirdly, what do they mean by the integration of original institutional economics and new institutional economics, that they have been observing since the 1990s and fourthly, what do they propose as a integration program. The analysis showed that the explicit methodology of original institutionalism, in fact, attributes to it characteristics, which are very close to the properties of “folk theory”. New institutional economics’ criticism is often based on the distorted interpretations of this scientific research program. The authors typically understand as the institutionalisms’ similarity the facts of the new institutionalism development by Douglass North, who used the data of the empirical behavioral research, but not the claims of original institutionalism. The method of integration proposed in the literature presupposes the adoption of the old institutionalism methodology by the new institutionalism, which could drastically reduce the quality of its research. The paper concludes that under present-day conditions, it is practically impossible to create a unified institutional economics.