观念、制度与政治秩序:解释政治变迁的综合模型

Ideas,Institutions,and Political Order:A Compound Model of Explaining Political Change

从制度角度对政治现象进行解释的各种路径,均无法摆脱简单化约、依靠外生因素、过于强调秩序和结构这三种局限。从观念角度对政治生活进行说明的各种路径虽然对变迁和能动性更为敏感,但它们在很大程度上展示了同样的缺陷。特别是这两种分析路径都侧重于识别和解释政治领域中规整有序的各类模式,所以不利于说明政治变迁的关键阶段。本文认为当前研究应适当弱化对于秩序的强调,将政治置于多重秩序而非既定均衡秩序之下,从而揭示变迁源自制度模式与观念模式不相匹配时的摩擦作用,并结合制度与观念两种分析路径以提升政治变迁的解释力。作为例证的20世纪六七十年代美国公民权利政策无法分别直接从制度或观念角度得到合理阐述,也展现了解释政治变迁综合模型的独特优势。

Institutional approaches to explaining political phenomena suffer from three common limitations: reductionism, reliance on exogenous factors, and excessive emphasis on order and structure. Ideational approaches to political explanation, while often more sensitive to change and agency, largely exhibit the same shortcomings. In particular, both perspectives share an emphasis on discerning and explaining patterns of ordered regularity in politics, making it hard to explain important episodes of political change. Relaxing this emphasis on order and viewing politics as situated in multiple and not necessarily equilibrated order suggests a way of synthesizing institutional and ideational approaches and developing more convincing accounts of political change. In this view, change arises out of 'friction' among mismatched institutional and ideational patterns. An account of American civil rights policy in the 1960 s and 1970 s, which is not amenable to either straightforward institutional or ideational explanation, demonstrates the advantages of the approach.