ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to clarify the case for historically oriented study and indicates the challenge it poses to diverse treatments of institutions found in both political science and history. It argues that this work is new because it brings questions of timing and temporality in politics to the center of the analysis of how institutions matter. The approach is historical because the analysis seeks to recast the basic premise of temporal order that has been the centerpiece of the study of American institutions in all of its incarnations past and present. The chapter reviews the various conceptions of order that have been fundamental to political analysis over the course of our discipline's history. Institutional politics is "politics as usual", "normal politics", or, a politics "in equilibrium". In the field of American politics the study of institutions has advanced through successive reformulations that consider how this ordering function operates.
