THE ‘NEW INSTITUTIONALISM’ HAS BEEN THE MOST VISIBLE movement in American political science during the last decade. It is a recoil from reductionism that is said to have dominated the political science of the previous decades. During the American Political Science Association presidency of Charles E. Lindblom in 1981, with Theodore Lowi and Sidney Tarrow as co-chairs of the Program Committee, it was decided that all titles of panels and round tables at the annual meeting were to have ‘and the state’ tacked on. The implication was that the behavioural revolution had resulted in the neglect of the power and autonomy of the state. But this adding on ‘and the state’ had very little effect on the content of the papers, and seemed primarily to have ‘buzzword’ significance. A second manifestation of this discomfort was an article in the American Political Science Review of 1984 by James March and Johan Olsen, entitled ‘The New Institutionalism; The Organizational Factor in Political Life’, followed by a book by the same two authors called Rediscovering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics.