The request to interpret the meaning of the historical record of citations for our article on the “New Institutionalism” is in the tradition of asking successful entrepreneurs to explain their successes, and is probably equally misguided. We interpret the charge as an invitation not to describe the real mysteries of fashion in citations but rather to explore why this article might have been cited if citation counts reflected valid judgments of scholarly significance.

The context for the article is a long history of intellectual struggle between partisans of two logics for taking, describing, or assessing human action. The first logic is one of consequences. It is a logic that sees human behavior as driven by anticipation of its consequences and evaluation of those consequences by some kind of utility function that reflects the desires of the actor. In discussions of political systems, scholars attracted to such a logic talk of the pursuit of interests and rational choice. They emphasize incentives and the complications of understanding rationality in an ecology of rational actors.

The second logic is one of appropriateness. It is a logic that sees human behavior as driven by a commitment to an identity and its rules. In discussions of political systems, scholars attracted to such a logic talk of institutions, routines, and identities. They emphasize rules as the residues of historical experience and the complications of rule-following in a world in which obligations are subject to interpretation and in which individuals function within numerous simultaneous identities.

The struggle between these two visions is complicated by their generality and their inclinations to mutual subsumesmanship. It is not hard to imagine either that rational calculation is simply a special case of appropriateness or that rule-following is simply a special case of rational calculation. Nevertheless, there is little doubt that ideas of consequentiality have achieved considerable contemporary standing, not only in economics but also in the other social and behavioral sciences, including political science.

In this article, we noted that the preeminence of logics of consequences was perhaps transitory, that there were signs in all the social sciences of interest in logics of appropriateness and institutions built around identities and rules. The interest both recalled an earlier set of traditions and presaged a future in which routines and rules might become more central to political understanding. The citation record of the article can be treated as possible confirmation of that interest and some indication that in the swings of fashion within political science, the garbs of rules and institutional thinking are appearing more on the streets of political science.

Swings of fashion in ideas are, however, substantially less interesting than their scholarly elaboration, an elaboration that often anticipates, rather than follows, their popularity (see March and Olsen 2006a, 2006b). Both in North America and in the rest of the world, serious efforts have been made to strengthen institutional analysis in two major ways. The first is a series of careful ethnographic and historical studies of political institutions and the ways in which they develop, interpret, and execute rules and identities. The second is the exploration of a set of theoretical ideas that picture rules as the carriers of experience and that understand changes in rules as (1) incremental changes in existing rules on the basis of learning from experience; (2) the diffusion of rules among institutions; and (3) the endogenous generation of new, distinctively novel rules.

The primary traditional and current strengths of political science are probably more consistent with the first set of developments than the second. Political scientists know much about institutions and the complex ecologies of rules that infuse political processes. They are distinguished by their ability to penetrate institutions in order to study them and by their feeling for the nuances of political life. They know somewhat less about the models of other fields of scholarship, such as evolutionary biology, epidemiology, linguistics, and chemistry, which inform an understanding of the creation, reproduction, and modification of rules.

The result is a reasonable division of labor; but like all systems involving a division of labor, it requires some links among the parts. Their mixed experience with economic models notwithstanding, students of the institutions of political life need to tie their elegant interpretations of institutional reality to the crude approximations available in theoretical ideas in order to further a joint product that contributes to political knowledge. That romantic idea stimulated the paper we wrote; it still stimulates us.

Johan P. Olsen has been the Research Director of ARENA (Center for European Studies, University of Oslo) since 1994. He received the APSA's John Gaus award in 2003 and its Aaron Wildavsky award in 2004.

The authors are grateful for the support of the Sloan Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, ARENA- Center for European Studies, University of Oslo, and the Norwegian Research Council.