Behavior or Institutions? The Historical Basis of the Neo-Institutionalism in the Political Sciences

The article aims to reconstruct historically the Political Science neo-institutionalism paradigm in order to explore two points. The first one consists in arguing that there were two factors that contributed to the neo-institutional "revolution" in politics, which are: the emergence of the economical analysis of political phenomena under the optics of the paradoxes of collective decisions, from the 1950s, & the crisis in behaviorism in the 1960s. The second one consists in arguing that the neo-institutional approach is a synthesis of part of the behaviorism with part of the "old institutionalism.". Adapted from the source document.