Rational Historical Institutionalism: With Application to British and Swedish Health Policy

Historical institutionalists have been among the most cognizant of the importance of considerations of time in studying political phenomena. However, they have tended to do so in ways that assume the absence of sufficient information or rationality on the part of actors. By contrast, rational choice institutionalists have tended to hold precisely the reverse bias - seeing actors as rational and informed, but failing to consider the kinds of strategies that follow from explicit consideration of time. This paper argues for a synthesis of the two approaches in which actors making decisions at ‘critical junctures’ are held to be able to foresee the patterns of ‘path dependency’ inherent in their available choices. A comparison of health policy in Sweden and the UK at the end of the Second World War shows the value of this synthesis.

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