Comportamento ou instituições? A evolução histórica do neo-institucionalismo da ciência política

Abstract

Manifesto meus sinceros agradecimentos aos pareceristas anônimos da RBCS pelas observações críticas e valiosas sugestões que fizeram ao texto. Na medida do possível, procurei incorporar as alterações, bem como os esclarecimentos sugeridos. Agradeço também à Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo -FAPESP -pelo suporte financeiro concedido à época em que realizei o estudo bibliográfico necessário à redação deste texto. Agradeço ainda a Raquel Weiss pela tradução das citações bibliográficas que estavam originalmente em inglês.

Política de saneamento básico no Brasil: discussão de uma trajetória

“…The idea was to perfect the models adopted in order to mold behaviors. As such, scholars from this school were far more concerned about normatively establishing prescriptive models of "constitutional design" to meet desired policy requirements than facing up to the objective facts of policies, which translated the real dynamics of the actors and their political behavior more concretely (Peres, 2008).…”

“…From a republican perspective, democracy was associated with the normativism of political philosophy and Rousseau's ideas about a direct, harmonious democracy, while in pluralism, democracy was linked to conflicts between different groups of stakeholders in society and their capacity to represent their interests in the centers of power. In this sense, the pluralists' rejection of the idea of popular sovereignty contained in the old institutionalism was what paved the way for the birth of a new school within US political science in the 1940s: behaviorism (Peres, 2008).…”

“…In political science, behaviorism broke away from the former institutionalism, promising a positive, empirically oriented, more conceptually rigorous theory that was also open to the multiple methodological approaches of the other humanities and social sciences. Its development shifted political scientists' attention from formal legal and administrative institutions to people and their behavior, values, and goals (Peres, 2008).…”

“…The harshest criticisms stressed the limitations of interpretations geared exclusively towards the political actions of individuals, essentially ignoring the institutional context of the political sphere and the formation of its preferences, as well as the dilemmas of collective action of which these individuals were part (Peres, 2008). Furthermore, the behaviorists' attempts to transpose the methods of the natural sciences to the humanities and social sciences ultimately laid bare the limited explanatory power of this kind of approach, because human and political behavior did not respond universally to the hypotheses formulated.…”

“…In this sense, it is fair to state that the development of a neo-institutionalist school as of the late 1970s came about both as a reaction to and a synthesis of the old institutionalism and behaviorism. From the former it retained a recognition of the centrality of institutions in modeling political action; from the latter it continued to value methodological rigor in the concepts used and the empirical orientation of the research (Peres, 2008).…”