ABSTRACT
The ideational turn in institutional theory has primarily been about the status of elites. This trend is particularly prominent in the subfields of comparative and international political economy, where distributional outcomes for the masses are typically considered to be a result of ideational and material fights among elites and their coalitions. This chapter delves into the three major approaches where political economy and institutional theory intersect (rationalist institutionalism, historical institutionalism, and constructivism) to examine what credence is given to legitimacy as an intersubjective social phenomenon. In particular, I provide a treatment of how aspects of this literature obscure how the ‘masses’ may provide impulses for institutional change to traditional powerholders (for the full treatise, see Seabrooke 2006: ch. 2). Following this critique I then examine how a conception of ‘intentional rationality’ and social mechanisms, once infused with ‘everyday politics’, can enlighten how legitimacy is a broad intersubjective phenomenon (see also Seabrooke 2007a). A conception of legitimacy and everyday politics provides a challenge to understandings of the ideational turn in institutional theory, and invites us to examine the social sources of political and economic change. It does so for the following three reasons.
