From Switchmen to Engine Drivers: How Ideas Move Institutional ...

From Switchmen to Engine Drivers: How Ideas Move Institutional Development*

Thomas Kestler Institute of Political Science and Sociology University of Würzburg Wittelsbacherplatz 1 97074 Würzburg, Germany E-Mail: [email protected]

Paper prepared for the ECPR General Conference , Oslo 6 – 9 September 2017 *This paper is an updated version of a paper presented at the APSA conference in San Francisco, August 30 - September 2, 2017.

Abstract: In institutional contexts, people frequently resort to the phrase “What if everyone did that”, which points to a specific logic of collective behavior. The puzzle is why the question is so persuasive. Drawing on motivational psychology and social philosophy, this paper aims to resolve this puzzle through a model of motivation in large groups, based on ideas and collective intentionality. I argue that the combination of ideas and collective intentionality causes fundamental shifts in the motivational structure of individual agents and brings them in line with a collective or institutional logic of behavior. In my model, ideas not only guide action (in the sense of Weber’s “switchmen”-metaphor), but they have motivational force on their own and become actual drivers of collective action and institutional development. Ideas can take the form of imagination, which means that an actor’s cognitive map becomes detached from perceptions and, therefore, from “brute reality”. In conjunction with collective intentionality, imagination brings actors to see themselves not as individuals (with corresponding limitations) but as organically integrated collectivity. In their minds (or probably on a more basic level of consciousness) actors acquire the “Gestalt” of a group. In such a state or disposition, cost-benefit calculations and perceptions of self-efficacy are fundamentally altered and the question “What if everyone did that” starts to make sense. Individuals no longer act as part of a group, but they imagine themselves as a group. The theoretical argument about the importance of ideas for collective action and institutional development is substantiated by the empirical example of the German Green Party.

Introduction

Political actors are well aware of the importance of ideas, especially those who try to manipulate them. Censorship is widespread in autocratic regimes and the most successful autocrats invest vast resources and efforts in the diffusion and control of ideas. Even in democratic regimes, certain ideas are banned from public discourse. Penal codes in many countries include the offence of sedition. The ideas individuals hold about basic institutions are constantly surveyed and actively influenced by publicly financed media and educational entities. While political reality gives testimony to the pivotal role of ideas, institutional theory lags behind in taking account of this fact. Economists regard institutions as coordinative equilibria, emerging from utility calculations (e.g. Knight, Sened 1995; Williamson 2000). Sociological accounts are largely based on social norms and socialization (Brinton 1998). Ideas are of secondary importance in both traditions. Yet, there are aspects of institutional reality that neither economic, nor sociological theory can adequately account for. For instance, both fail to explain how institutions come into being and how they change. Norms have to be conveyed and sanctioned, rules of transaction have to be established and sustained. Furthermore, the disposition of individuals in institutional contexts to forego individual gains and to sustain cooperation despite the option of shirking or freeriding remains an unresolved puzzle. The importance of ideas becomes evident when costly goods are collectively pursued, like defending the country or the community of the faithful against an enemy, overthrowing a government or dedicating huge amounts of resources to a common goal (like flying to the moon or fighting social inequality). In such cases, observed behavior stands in sharp contradiction to any market-like conception 2   

of collective action: “[P]eople [are] prepared to sacrifice wealth, a pleasant and carefree lifestyle, or sometimes even their very lives for a common cause“ (van Stekelenburg und Klandermans 2013, p. 886) – why? Standard explanations based on utility or social norms can hardly account for such behavior. Utility calculations seem implausible in cases where individuals accept costs and sacrifices far beyond their returns. Social norms, on the other hand, require sanctioning structures whose provision poses the problem of explanation (Elster 1989). The mechanism of internalization provides no solution because it reduces individual agency in social and political contexts to unrealistically low levels. Empirically, we know that individuals do not, like social dopes, act as stubborn executers of internalized norms, but that they often contribute deliberately to collective goals. They even take the initiative in contexts where social norms are not (yet) established. Even if institutional structures exist, individuals are not, in the first place, compelled to contribute to a common good (by the threat of sanctions), they rather want to contribute. Cooperation is not perceived as a duty, but as rewarding experience. In fact, the capacity to create volition in their members can be regarded the very core of strong, large-scale institutions like mass parties, religious communities or nation states. Ideas can provide an explanation for this motivational capacity, but their supposed role in institutional development still lacks theoretical underpinning. Although there is a broadening trend to integrate ideas into institutional theory, usually referred to as “ideational turn”, they remain a kind of theoretical accessory, a fill-in element for explanatory needs arising from one or another institutionalist approach. Blyth points to this somewhat arbitrary and poorly founded treatment of ideas: “Their definition, operationalization, and explanatory power are simply derivative of the wider theory in which they are embedded” (Blyth 1997, p. 231). Ideas are fitted into existing theories without changing the original paradigm. Therefore, it is not justified yet to speak of a fourth institutionalism. For ideas to take center stage in institutional theory, it has to be realized and theoretically substantiated that ideas can influence individual motivation just as utility calculations and social norms do. This paper aims at fulfilling this desideratum. It proposes a theoretical framework that turns ideas from appendages of institutional theory into its core component. It is argued that ideas are fundamental for political life and institutional development because they can modify individual structures of motivation. In other words, ideas not only direct individual interests and desires into certain directions, as Weber’s famous switchmen-metaphor suggests, but they provide the (motivational) energy that sets the train of action and institutional development into motion. To substantiate this claim I will specify the mechanisms responsible for the motivational effect of ideas on the individual level. For this purpose, I borrow from motivational psychology and social philosophy, especially from the work of

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John Searle. To set the ground for the subsequent argument, I will start with a discussion of ideational institutionalist propositions.1 Ideational approaches come in a broad variety, but they can all be subsumed under Weber’s switchmen-metaphor: “Not ideas, but material and ideal interests, directly govern men’s conduct. Yet very frequently the ‘world images’ that have been created by ‘ideas’ have, like switchmen, determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interests” (Gerth, Mills 1997, p. 280). This conception rests, at least implicitly, on three basic propositions: The first of them holds that ideas are epistemically linked to perceptions. Perceptions of reality (ontological questions aside) are supposed to provide the tracks of thought and action while ideas help to select among them. According to this conception, ideas are at the service of perceptions, to give them form and consistency. Even rational choice theory concedes that ideas have a place in politics because information provided by perceptional inputs is incomplete and not necessarily coherent. To make sense of the world around us and to design plans of action that extend beyond the immediate situation, we need cognitive maps and interpretive schemes (Goldstein, Keohane 1993). Ideas serve as cognitive tools that facilitate decisions in situations of incomplete information and uncertainty. As such, they remain secondary to both, preferences and perceptions. Constructivists go a step further. While rational choice approaches assume that individuals act on stable sets of preferences, whereby ideas only intervene in the choice of strategies, in the constructivist view the effect of ideas extends to individuals’ “most basic preferences and very identity” (Hall and Taylor 1996, p. 948). The effects of ideas are located on a more basic level. They are supposed to affect not only the way an individual makes sense of the perceived reality and choses her options for action, but also on the way she perceives this reality, in the first place (Hay 2008). Constructivist institutionalists focus on the group level where ideas provide the common cognitive frame within which a group comes to act, including mutual commitments and shared norms of action.2 Ideas in this view are not individual cognitive tools, but rather social constructions that influence individual cognition. Such approaches address the question of how ideas on the collective level emerge, how they influence behavior and how they are produced and reproduced through discourse, culture and institutions. Groups and joint action only become possible in the way of jointly constructed tracks of action. While

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For an overview of this strand of literature see Schmitt (2008), Béland and Cox (2011) or Blyth (2003). One examples of such an approach is Berman’s study of social democracy in Germany and Sweden (1998), which shows that, “actors with different ideas will make different decisions, even when placed in similar environments” (p. 33). Similarly, McNamara (1998) explains the outcomes of European monetary union by reference to ideas. In Sikkink’s (1991) study on economic policy in Argentina and Brazil, ideas are described as expressions of fundamental meaning systems on the level of each country.

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rationalists regard ideas as cognitive tools on the individual level, constructivists see them as genuinely social phenomena (Wendt 1999).3 In both conceptions, however, ideas gain relevance only in relation to perceptions. I will argue below that this link between ideas and perceptions has to be discarded to understand the motivational effect of ideas. The second proposition holds that ideas are equivalent to beliefs as opposed to interests.4 Although the relation between ideas and interests in Weber’s quote is controversial (see Eastwood 2005), the fact that tracks and switchmen on the one hand are opposed to interests, on the other, implies that the former are separate and distinguishable from the latter. While it is widely recognized that both components are connected, the relationship between them remains elusive. At the core of the matter is an inherent ambivalence of the concept of interest, which includes the notion of desire, as well as the notion of choice. Ideas-as beliefs are about choice. If they are regarded as separate from interests, does this imply they are separate from desires? Goldstein and Keohane (1993), for example, concede that ideas cannot be conceptualized independently from interests, which would suggest a relationship between ideas-as-beliefs and desires.5 Ultimately, however, the distinction between ideas and interests is retained, as Laffey and Weldes (1997) notice. To specify the motivational effect of ideas requires a clarification of this point – the mechanism that connects ideas to desires. Third and finally, ideational approaches rest on the (at least implicit) assumption that all types of action, including shared action, derives from individual intentionality.6 The core of Weber’s methodological individualism is universally extant in institutional theory insofar as the analyzability of collective or shared action into individual intentional states is taken for granted. Intentions to act are supposed to be formed in the first person singular, even when action is shared within groups or in institutional contexts. While ideas can be shared – as mechanisms to coordinate individual goals (in the rationalist account) or as social artefacts that shape individual intentions (in the constructivist account) – the fact of sharing does not extend to the structure of intentionality itself. Volition and intentionality remain individualized. Acting jointly while intending individually, however, leads to contradictions that can only be resolved by modifying the structure of intentionality itself (Schmid 2005).

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Laffer and Weldes (1997, p. 206) note that ideas can be conceived on the level of culture, as discourse and practice, or on the level of individual cognition, in the sense of beliefs. These different meanings are not always considered properly, but they are consequential for the way ideas are supposed to act on individual motivation. 4 See, e.g., Goldstein and Keohane (1993, p. 3): “[W]e define [ideas] as beliefs held by individuals.” 5 “We recognize that ideas and interests are not phenomenologically separate and that all interests involve beliefs, and therefore ideas as we conceive them” (Goldstein and Keohane 1993, p. 26). 6 Intentionality is a basic philosophical concept that describes, in very general terms, a mental state of directedness (see Jacob 2003).

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Conceptions of ideas based on these three propositions fail to explain the capacity of ideas to change individual structures of motivation and, therefore, to give them a primary status in institutional theory. The major part of this paper (sections two through five) has the purpose of correcting these propositions and outlining an alternative conception, based not on perception, but on imagination, not on beliefs, but on desires, and not on individual, but on collective intentionality. In the final section, I shortly outline what such a model of motivation means for empirical institutional analysis through the use of an empirical example, the German Green party.

From perception to imagination

In the following paragraphs, I will argue that ideas should not be understood as filters between mind and perceived reality, but instead as imaginations that are, at least partially, detached from perceptions. Since Benedict Anderson’s groundbreaking work it has been standard practice to refer to imagination as a crucial aspect of (macro-)social reality. Yet, the implications of this assertion have so far not been fully appreciated. Ideas are still understood not as imaginations, but rather as cognitive tools that guide attention, allow selection of objects in the environment and reduce complexity. Organizational institutionalism recurs to the notion of cognitive schemata – typifications that facilitate perception and information processing (Axelrod 1973). DiMaggio (1997) describes schemata as basic cultural units that allow the sharing of cognitive content. On a more complex level, ideas take the form of cognitive maps, worldviews or paradigms that provide orientation in situations of uncertainty (e.g. Hall 1993; Goldstein, Keohane 1993). The common denominator of ideational approaches is their conception of ideas as mental tools. In the most extensive conception, ideas extend to the mode of thinking itself. They take the form of a software the mind makes use of to perform its information processing tasks (Hofstede 2005). Without it, the ones and zeros fed into it by the senses could not be deciphered. Depending on the kind of software, the mind produces different preferences and modes of thought, but it depends, in any case, on perceptual inputs. Therefore, ideas are supposed to have, in Searle’s terms, a mind-to-world fit: The mind is fitted to the external world (independent of its ontological status, be it “brute reality” or mere discourse). It only succeeds in its task if and insofar as mental representations correspond to their real world referents. If the mind is fitted correctly to reality, ideas are true, if not, they are wrong. At the very least, ideas have to be sufficiently coherent to be compatible with perceptions. They are, in Searle’s conception, derivative of perceptions, which, in turn, constitute a connection between mind and world. Perceptions 6   

of objects in the world provide the conditions an intentional state requires to be satisfied. Conditions of satisfaction are the conditions in “the world which must be satisfied if the intentional state is to be satisfied” (Searle 2010, p. 29). As representations of real-world referents, perceptions are true by definition because their content is caused by the objects they represent (Searle 2010, p. 38). Ideas are mental states that fit the mind to perceptions. Eventually, they fill the gaps between perceptions by substituting the perceived objects through mental representations. In any case, ideas are subordinate to perceptions. Imagination is fundamentally different in this regard. According to Searle, imaginative mental states have no direction of fit and no conditions of satisfaction. However, if this were true, imagination would be inconsequential in motivational terms; it could not have those crucial functions in creating social and institutional reality Searle himself speaks of because they would be unrelated to action (Searle 2010, p. 16). Unlike Searle, I assume that imagination has a direction of fit, similar to beliefs, hopes, and desires. I regard it a misconception to equate imagination with fiction, of which Searle states that “the commitment to the conditions of satisfaction are deliberately suspended” (1983, p. 18). To divest intentions of their conditions of satisfaction presupposes conscious awareness of their fictitious character. Not all imaginations are consciously recognized as fictions. Nations are experienced as real; the same holds for god, the saints and paradise, which are imagined as genuine representations, not of reality but with equal status: The existence of paradise cannot be perceptually validated, but it is imagined as real. Imaginations can be completely decoupled from perceptions and, still, carry commitments to conditions of satisfaction. This means that imagination creates its own referents on the level of the mind. The fear of hell and the hope for paradise are mental states with conditions of satisfaction, with the latter deriving not from perceptions but from imagination. In such a state, the mind is not fed by reality, but rather it feeds itself. Intentional states no longer have a mind-to-world fit, but a mind-to-mind fit and, therefore, they cannot be true or false. In other words, the intentional content is decoupled from, or at least takes priority over, real-world referents and so do all kinds of intentional states (beliefs, fears, desires, hopes) that are directed towards the imagined objects. This ability of the mind to create its own reality is utterly underestimated in social science.7 Given the fact that there is no perceptual anchor of mental representations in the world, imaginations can carry the mind farer from reality than other mental states can. In Searle’s conception,

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Castoriadis’ (1997) forceful argument about the imaginative constitution of society has not been taken seriously and institutional theory has largely ignored it.

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beliefs and hopes are embedded in a network of knowledge and commitments that defines the space of possibilities and sets limits to the intentional content. Searle calls this the background and attributes to it “all of those abilities, capacities, dispositions, ways of doing things, and general know-how that enable us to carry out our intentions and apply our intentional states generally” (Searle 2010, p. 31). Background knowledge directs and constrains intentional states. I cannot intend that it will rain because such an intention is inconsistent with knowledge and experience. I cannot believe that sugar is unhealthy unless I have an idea of nutrition; once I hold this belief, I cannot intend to buy and to eat lots of chocolate without running into inconsistencies. Thus, intentions are not only bound by brute facts out there in reality, but also by previous intentions, which form a net of commitments and constraints for future intentions. It is because of these constraints that one cannot command someone to believe or to hope something (Searle 2010, p. 40). Imagination is of a different nature. The claim “Imagine!” makes perfect sense. This is not because imaginations have no conditions of satisfaction, but because they are not constrained by background knowledge and commitments in the same way as perceptually anchored intentional states are. Because of this, imaginations constitute a very powerful mental mechanism. Ideas-as-imaginations allow individuals to form intentions of a much wider range, unbound by the constraints of background knowledge stemming from social interaction and physical realities. In the realm of imagination, intentional subjects are able to move beyond space and time, bodily needs and limits. They are no longer faced with the requirement of consistency. In short, imagination opens up an unlimited space of possibilities – it builds new tracks of thought and action. This capacity renders imagination consequential for institutional reality. It allows one, via means of communication, to create collective identities and collective agents with attributions like immortality and unlimited power. In other words, imagination allows to create a Leviathan. In fact, institutional reality emerges, basically, from imagination, shared though texts and created by individual minds.8 Perceptions, if they come into play at all, are fitted to the imagined content. Perceptions are not the raw material from which mental representations of the world are construed; rather, they are selected, ignored or manipulated to fit the imagined content. The use of symbols gives testimony to this logic and the secondary status of perceptions: It is not ideas that are supposed to make sense of perceived real world objects, but, vice versa, objects in the world are manipulated and they are purposefully sought out to give substance to imagined contents (Castoriadis 1997). If someone prays to a saint, the referent of

                                                             8 Texts are epistemically relevant for imagination as substitutes for real world referents. Thus, texts are in a very fundamental sense the extensions of man McLuhan (2001) speaks of.

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this mental state is created by the mind. Symbolic or figurative representations of the saint eventually provide additional perceptual anchors, as a support for imagination, but they have no primary epistemic status. Imaginations have conditions of satisfaction just as other intentional states have, and, therefore, are potentially conductive to actions. Imaginations are special in one important way: They have no mindto-world fit insofar as they are not contingent upon perceptions. Rather, we should speak of a mind-tomind fit, which allows extending the space of intentionality beyond time, space and individual (bodily) limitations. Thanks to this imaginative capacity, humans are capable of creating macro institutions like the Roman Empire, the Christian Church or nation states. However, as a merely mental state, imagination remains inconsequential for institutional reality. For manifest action to take place in an institutional context, additional conditions are required.

From belief to desire

Imaginations alone are not enough to cause an intention to act.9 Just as I can hope that it will rain or believe that the climate is heating up, I can also imagine that my nation is strong or that paradise will come, but I hardly intend to bring about these states. Beliefs or hopes do not necessarily entail action. Knowing that doing sports would be in one’s best interest and how to put this into practice are still insufficient to arouse motivation. Psychologists have shown that beliefs are a poor predictor of behavior (Ajzen, Fishbein 1977). The same holds for imaginations, which, as such, remain confined to the mental sphere. To be sure, ideas (beliefs or imaginations) are necessary for action (after all, we cannot intend to act on something we have no idea about), but they are not sufficient for an intention to act to arise. Unlike imaginations, intentions to act are subject to a stronger sort of constraint. While hopes, beliefs and imaginations are mental states, to act means to engage directly with the world. Such an (action-related) intentional state or intention to act has a world–to-mind fit because it implies an intervention that fits the world to the mental content. To pass from knowing, imagining or remembering a certain state of the world to actively intervening into the world requires an additional motivational factor, desire, in accordance with the classical formula “desire plus belief equals action”.10 Beliefs are                                                              9

Note that “[w]e must distinguish between intentions as states of intending and intentions as what is intended, just as we distinguish between states of believing and what is believed, the so-called 'content' of the believing” (Sellars 1968, p. 182). 10 For Searle, desire is not a component of intentions to act, but a homologous intentional state with a world-tomind fit. However, Searle also underlines the requirement of a motivational factor to bring about action: “[A]ll

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mental representations of certain states of the world and desires are intentional states directed at bringing about these states. Motivation requires both, beliefs and desires. Ideational approaches have so far failed to take systematically account of this fact because the distinction between belief and desire is not elaborated explicitly. The differentiation between beliefs and desires gets blurred by the term “interest”. Ideational institutionalists emphasize the fact that ideas influence or even constitute actors’ interests (Blyth 2003, p.8) – but does this refer to beliefs or to desires? Frequently, the use of the term “interest” implies including desire, but when it comes to explaining the effect of ideas, the suggested mechanisms only relate to beliefs that direct action, not to the desires that drive them. In other words, the proposed mechanisms that connect ideas and interests refer to decisional aspects, not to motivational ones. I will explain this with an example: The “interest” in going to a restaurant to have lunch can be understood in two different ways. In a decisional sense, the interest refers to a choice between different (cognitively constituted) “tracks” of action – eating at a restaurant, in the university canteen or skipping the meal due to aesthetic considerations or work ethics. This decision is influenced by ideas which not only determine the (perceived) costs and benefits of each choice, including normative aspects, but also constitute the available options. Without knowing what a restaurant is, I cannot have the intention to go there, no matter how hungry I am. Ideas, therefore, constitute tracks of action on the one hand and they influence the choice among them, on the other. Still, however, ideas in this sense are decisional devices that relate to choice. In a motivational sense, the term interest refers to the underlying reasons for action, the motivational force or volitional impulse that produces the intention to act. If ideas have motivational force, as I am trying to show in this paper, their effect has to include desires. Without desire, no kind of belief or imagination will produce action. The desire to go to a restaurant stems from hunger, which on the individual level is enough to drive action. On the collective level, where no basic needs exist, the desire to act stems from psychological needs, namely those identified by McClelland (1990): achievement, power and affiliation. How are desires for satisfying these needs created in groups? To get closer to the underlying mechanism I will take up two concepts from psychology and social philosophy, self-efficacy and intentional control. These concepts have to be distinguished, even though there are terminological overlaps. The notion of self-efficacy is central to psychological models of motivation. It is defined as “people's beliefs about their capabilities to produce designated levels of performance that exercise influence over events that affect their lives. Self-efficacy beliefs determine

                                                             total reasons for action must contain at least one motivator, where the motivator consists of a factitive entity, such as a desire or an obligation” (Searle 2010, p. 126).

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how people feel, think, motivate themselves and behave” (Bandura 1994, p. 71). Motivation depends on a sense of self-efficacy, defined here as a function of beliefs about the actor’s self and her capacity to act. If the grapes are hanging too high, the desire to grab them will not arise (Elster 1983). If the restaurant is nearby and affordable, there is nothing standing in the way of going there. In group action, the condition of self-efficacy is more difficult to attain. Any type of interaction entails a measure of uncertainty – to marry, to dance a tango, to paint a house together or to move a couch upstairs. The influence of individual action over the intended outcome is necessarily limited as soon as the actions of others come into play, even if interaction is indirect. If I intend to go to work, I act on the assumption that the train is going to arrive, that the university is not shut down by a strike, and that students will show up for the course. In other words, my intention to go to work involves a broad range of intentions on part of other people. Even if I supposedly act alone, in fact I engage in group-action because the intended outcome is brought about by an implicit, unconscious group that is made up of train drivers, university staff, colleagues and students. In this sense, taking a train is no less a kind of shared action than to marry or to dance a tango because it also presupposes intentions of others. Thus, how can the condition of self-efficacy be assured in such situations? Shared knowledge and mutual expectations provide a way out. I may not be perfectly certain about the intentions of others, but neither are they completely unpredictable – they can be tapped, to a certain degree. Just as I can gauge the quality of the water in a sea before springing into it, I can also gauge the behavior of my fellow group members from observational hints, from past experiences and from a network of knowledge. The cultural environment together with perceptual reassurance allows for probability calculations that enhance the level of perceived self-efficacy in the pursuance of an individual or a shared goal. Thus, ideas as shared knowledge reduce uncertainty in group-action, enhance the level of self-efficacy and, thereby, create desire on part of group members. The notion of control over action is similar to self-efficacy. Ajzen (1991) speaks of perceived behavioral control as individual’s “confidence in their ability to perform [a behavior]. Intentional control, however, relates to a more fundamental level of motivation and action. Anette Baier (1970) stipulates that intentional control circumscribes the very range of intentions a person is capable of conceiving. We cannot intend what we cannot control, and vice versa. Baier calls this the “principle of the delimited sovereignty of intention”, which means that, “the proper objects of intending, unlike the proper objects of aiming at, seem limited to my actions (not the sun's) and to things I can do” (Baier 1970, p. 649). Bratman takes this notion of intentional sovereignty up and calls it “settling condition”: “I may only intend what I think my so intending settles” (Bratman 1999, p. 149). This condition constrains intentions to what one takes to be up to oneself to decide. 11   

Intentional control is a stronger condition than beliefs and efficacy calculations; it is predicated not (only) on knowledge, but on a fundamental sense of control which can only be conferred by bodily awareness. It stems from the sensual experience of the body. The intention to raise my arm instantly has the effect of my arm going up; control of action is nearly perfect. The awareness of bodily control, therefore, is different from planning and cognitively conceiving an action, it is immediate. Planning to raise the arm is a question of cognition and confidence; actually intending to raise the arm requires an intimate sense of bodily awareness and intentional control. Knowledge cannot substitute the sense of control conferred by bodily awareness. Knowing or to believing that the train will arrive or that my students will show up at the agreed-upon time is something utterly different from the immediate control over my limbs I use to step through the door, to take seat in the train and so on. Knowledge and beliefs have conditions of satisfaction that are causally different from the intentional state itself. Intention in action, by contrast, is at the same time cause and effect of the intended action – it is causally selfreferential, as Searle puts it. It can only be had if it is satisfied; it requires intentional sovereignty. Motivation, therefore, is predicated on a sense of self-efficacy on the level of beliefs and knowledge as well as on intentional control and bodily awareness. In this way, joint action like painting a house together can be broken down into a belief component that includes the mutual commitment between my colleague and me (to paint two sides each, say), and a desire component that involves the intention to act, that is, to move my body in accordance with the task to paint the color on the wall. Beliefs and shared knowledge are important with regard to self-efficacy. Without knowing about the contribution of my colleague, I lack the motivation to do my part. Social philosophy as well as institutional theory pay much attention to mechanisms like conventions (Lewis 1969), shared values or explicit commitments (Gilbert 1990, 2014) that allow one to act together. Institutions are mostly conceived in this sense, as tools to reduce uncertainty in social interaction through mutual commitment (North 2005; Scott 2008). In such an understanding, social institutions are tools that allow forming intentions in complex situations of interaction. They constitute a framework of knowledge, including expectations about the intentions of others, within which actions are planned and executed. Put differently, social institutions allow individual action plans to be coordinated. As part of an action plan, the individual intention to act does not refer to painting the house, but to executing the individual action as part of the plan. This is what I intend to do and what is under my full individual control. Thus, intentions to act still have an individualized structure. I intend to step through the door (as part of my plan to go to work) or to move the paintbrush in my hand (as part of our agreed-upon plan to paint the house together). Therefore, painting a house together may be regarded an 12   

instance of shared action, but the fact of sharing is established on a different, upstream level, the (jointly constituted) background. It is not contained in the structure of intentionality itself. The common knowledge and mutual commitments that constitute a team of painters provides reassurance for each member and, therefore, a sense of self-efficacy in pursuing the collective goal. The goal and the plan to act on this goal arise from individual desires to get the house painted. By contrast, the sense of control necessary to actually form an intention to paint stems from bodily awareness on a more basic, noncognitive level of consciousness. Shared knowledge should not be confused with shared intentionality and action. In painting a house together or going to work, action is not shared, it is rather coordinated. Therefore, the fact that people paint houses together does not contradict the settling condition because the individual contributions to this collective venture take place within a framework of shared knowledge, but they arise from sovereign individual intentions to act. However, shared knowledge as basis for collective action has its limitations. Cognitively coordinating individual actions is not enough to dance a tango, for example. Even if the dancing partners know each other and have committed themselves explicitly to dance together, it is still too demanding a task to anticipate and observe every move of the other and to act accordingly, while, in turn, the dancing partner anticipates and observes these moves and so on. Everyone who has once had trouble getting past a person coming from the opposite direction on a sidewalk knows how difficult coordination can be even in simple situations of interaction. Dancing a tango is much more demanding and it obviously exceeds the cognitive capacities of mutual observation and adaptation. Even without practical expertise, I dare to assert that it cannot be analyzed into the sum of individual contributions or the coordinated actions of individual dancers.11 Searle (2006) insists that there is more to shared action than individual intentions plus some connecting cognitive mechanism based on mutual observation, commitments or the institutional background. This becomes even more evident in the case of large groups, which require coordination among many people under conditions of limited mutual observation. Moreover, individual action as part of a shared action plan in large groups has no significant influence on the outcome. Different from painting parts of a house, the contribution of an individual voter to the outcome of an election is negligible. Shared action in large groups, therefore, cannot be bracketed down into individual contributions, because the effect of these contributions tends towards zero. Even if the aggregated action of the group is effective in bringing about the desired outcome, the individual contribution is not.

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The fact that young children with limited cognitive capacities engage in cooperation speaks against a merely knowledge-based account of shared action, too.

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Without self-efficiency, an essential motivational requirement is lacking. This leads to the following equally unsatisfying options: First, individual contributions to shared goals have an individualized intentional structure of the kind “I intend” (to cast my ballot, say). In this case, the condition of selfefficacy is lacking. Mutual knowledge provides no solution because knowing about the intentions of others does not render the individual contribution more effective. Second, individual intentions refer to the collective goal (to elect a president or a parliament). In this case, the condition of control is lacking. The collective action may in its totality be effective in bringing about the intended goal, but no single participant has noteworthy control over this outcome because this would imply a sense of control over the intentions of others analogous to bodily awareness. To explain shared action in large groups, either the efficacy condition or the control condition have to be modified. With regard to self-efficacy, there are few options at hand. Shared knowledge and mutual commitments cannot change the fact that individual contributions to shared actions in large groups are negligible. I, therefore, propose to seek a solution in the control condition. Indeed, the expression “What if everyone did that”, which is often interpreted as indicative of a shared normative framework, may also point to a sense of control over the intentions of others. I think this is the case. I argue that in collectivities a state can be achieved that is equivalent to bodily awareness and that moves intentional control to the collective level. The underlying mechanism is collective intentionality, which I suppose to be the missing link between ideas and desires.

From “I intend” to “we intend”

So far, we have regarded intentions in action to be bound to bodily awareness and control. This leads into trouble as soon as an imagined community becomes an acting group. Imaginations may well be detached from perceptions and bring about a collective actor on the level of the mind, but when physical action is involved, illusions about a plural subject must invariably collapse. If intentionality in action is bound to bodily awareness, it cannot be other than individual intentionality of the form “I intend”. Perceptions of bodily movements, sensual experiences and interactions all confirm the individual character of action. In bodily experiences, individuality imposes itself. Given these natural limitations of intentional control, how can it be that imaginations have real consequences for political life and institutional development? How can it be that an imagined We gives way to a manifest collective actor? Empirically, we know that individuals in collective contexts behave differently from isolated individuals and that collective or shared activities are experienced not as activity in a group, but as 14   

activity as a group. Dancing a tango is something fundamentally different from dancing alone; playing soccer in a team is different from running or swimming. Even if collective activities are cognitively framed as individual contribution to a group activity (“what did you do yesterday?” – “I played soccer with my friends”), they are experienced as genuinely collective on a more fundamental level. What is actually experienced is better described as “we played soccer”. In institutional contexts, individuals seem to experience such a sense of community, too. The phrase “What if everyone did that?” expresses exactly such a feeling of belonging or connectedness, a sense that one’s own action has a direct effect on the actions of others, just as in team sports, where the efforts and performance of individual players encourage the other players. Each player acts as if collective action was contingent upon her action, as if she, in a certain way, embodies the collective subject. In such a state, actions are not experienced as individual actions, but as genuinely collective actions. Intentionality takes on a collective quality on the level of each participant, which in social philosophy is referred to as collective intentionality: A shift from the I-mode of intending to the Wemode, in which the imagined collective becomes the intentional subject. Human beings, like other species, are capable of experiencing action in groups not as sharing of individual intentions, but as genuinely collective action. They shift from “I intend” (to do my duty or to make my contribution) to “We intend” (to defend, as a nation, the fatherland or to win, as a team, the game). The phenomenon of collective intentionality is subject of a huge debate in social philosophy, which, basically, revolves around the question whether the state of collectivity resides inside individual minds or if it is constituted by some external mechanism like conventions or agreements.12 In this regard, I agree with Searle in assuming that collective intentionality is internal to individual minds and, at the same time, unreducible to individual intentions: “There really is such a thing as collective intentional behavior that is not the same as the summation of individual intentional behavior” (Searle 1990, p. 402). Collective intentionality may be understood as synchronization and merging of action orientations as can also be observed in the animal world, in herds or swarms.13 Searle (2010, p. 412) describes this mechanism through the use of an example, the joint preparation of a sauce hollandaise, by analogy with polynominal individual actions such as the firing of a gun: „[J]ust as I fire the gun by

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For the first position see e.g. Sellars (1980) and Searle (1990, 2010); for the second position see Tuomela and Miller (1988), Tuomela (2000) and Gilbert (1989). 13 Tomasello and Carpenter (2007) assume that the capacity to share intentions is an exclusively human trait because they conceive it as a cognitive mechanism. I don’t share this view because I regard collective intentionality to be a non-cognitive phenomenon. This is also Searle’s position: “Many species of animals, our own especially, have a capacity for collective intentionality. By this I mean not only that they engage in cooperative behavior, but that they share intentional states such as beliefs, desires, and intentions” (Searle 1995, p. 23). What is indeed exclusively human is imaginative capacity – animals do not use symbols.

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means of my pulling the trigger, so We make the sauce by means of Me stirring and You pouring.“ Just as the action of firing a gun constitutes a single intentional operation, so the preparation of the sauce is to be understood as a unitary action: „We intend to make the sauce by means of Me stirring“, whereby the pouring of my cooperation partner constitutes not an external contribution to our common endeavor, but an integral part of my stirring. Our joint action of preparing the sauce is not the sum of individual contribution, but a single, unitary intentional operation by a collective intentional subject. In such a state, individual contributions are not perceived and experienced as distinct from group action. On the institutional level, actions like voting or hoisting the national flag appear as individual actions, but they are experienced, on a more fundamental level, as essentially collective actions carried out by a plural intentional subject. I think it is this kind of plural subject which the phrase “What if everyone did that” refers to. To be sure, collective actions are carried out, ultimately, by individuals and they usually come with a share of individual intentionality. Steps like putting on a jacket, leaving the house, walking to the polling place and so on are intended individually, but they are derivative of an overall collective intention. I intend to cast my ballot – but only because and insofar as we intend to elect a new parliament.14 Acting in a group becomes acting as a group, the intentional subject shifts from the individual to the collective. When the intentional subject shifts, so does the sense of control. Intentional autonomy is not contingent upon physical limitations anymore. Just as I can intend to raise my arm, we can intend to defeat a competing team or to elect a new parliament, as soon as intentionality shifts to the (imagined) plural subject. This way, the mechanism of collective intentionality explains shared action in large groups because it provides a solution to the problem of intentional control. In such a state, motivation for action emerges because the condition of individual control is suspended and each actor becomes able to satisfy psychological needs far beyond her individual range. Just as imagination frees the mind of consistency requirements and perceptual limitations, collective intentionality allows for action beyond physical, bodily limits through the transformation of group members into a plural subject.15 A plural subject must not be mistaken as an emergent group mind. Collective intentionality is collective in its structure, but it is created within individuals: “It is of the form ‘we intend‘ even though it is in my individual head“ (Searle 2008, p. 119). Actually, collective intentionality involves a number

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Theoretical confusions like the voting paradox stem from the attempt to reduce shared action like voting to individual intentions. It may be due to cultural patterns in Western societies to frame group action in individual terms, even at the price of theoretical inconsistency. 15 Thus, institutions are by no means constraints to individual action, as switchmen conceptions, especially in NIE, have it (North 1990; Williamson 2000). To the contrary, they are empowering structures that allow for the satisfaction of needs beyond individual limitations.

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of individuals; it is collective also in an ontological sense, but it need not. It can also be created in a single individual, in a brain in a vat, as Searle puts it, in the brains of dreamers or insane persons. This, however, is a (fortunately) rare, pathological state. Normally, the link between mind and world is not completely cut off. Intentions, even if they are attributed to an imagined We, require some perceptional foundation, an external stimulus that provides them with ontological substance. Here, a final question appears: How and when does a plural subject emerge? If both states, individual and collective intentionality, are possible, how is the shift from the first to the latter state brought about? Searle points to the fact that collective intentionality “requires something like a preintentional sense of ‘the other’, […] some level of sense of community before it can ever function” (1990, p. 413). Before intentionality can be shared, a group has to be constituted on a preintentional level. The emergence of such a proto-collective is not a matter of cognition – of knowledge and (conscious) mutual observation (Schmid 2005). We may speak of latent groups that have not yet entered into a state of conscious collectivity, for example a number of children in a schoolyard or passengers on a bus trip. In such situations, the involved individuals do not perceive themselves as members of a group, and yet, there is a sense of awareness of the existence of others and a shared situation. Such a primary fact of sharing is constituted on a fundamental, pre-reflective and pre-intentional level. The relationship between a latent group and collective intentionality shows an analogy to bodily awareness and action. Individuals are most of the time latently or pre-consciously aware of their body; conscious intentions only emerge in the course of action. A pre-conscious, pre-intentional sense of awareness precedes and conditions intentional bodily actions. However, using the body increases the sense of bodily awareness, while a lack of action and motion eventually leads to declining awareness. It is the same with groups and collective action: “[C]ollective behavior certainly augments the sense of others as cooperative agents, but that sense can exist without any collective intentionality” (Searle 1990, p. 413). 16 Just like the body, the existence of a group is felt more intensely when is activated, but it can exist independently on a pre-reflexive level.17 Thus, on the most basic level groups are constituted preconsciously, by a number of people subliminally noticing the existence or proximity of each other. In large groups, this effect is produced by media. Benedict Anderson describes the pre-conscious constitution of an imagined community through newspapers:

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Interestingly, collective intentionality is experienced as strongest when it is linked to bodily action. The limbs of the body can be felt even in cases where they do not exist, after an amputation or after a cerebral lesion (Vignemont 2011). Similarly, a group can be experienced as real without existing and without ever becoming an actual group agent.

17

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What were the characteristics of the first American newspapers, North or South? They began essentially as appendages of the market. Early gazettes contained – aside from news about the metropole – commercial news (when ships would arrive and depart, what prices were current for what commodities in what ports), as well as colonial political appointments, marriages of the wealthy, and so forth. In other words, what brought together, on the same page, this marriage with that ship, this price with that bishop, was the very structure of the colonial administration and market-system itself. In this way, the newspaper of Caracas quite naturally, and even apolitically, created an imagined community among a specific assemblage of fellow-readers, to whom these ships, bridges, bishops and prices belonged. In time, of course, it was only to be expected that political elements would enter it (Anderson 1983, p. 62).

The political elements Anderson mentions at the end of the quote refer to the becoming conscious of this community through the constitution of an imagined We. Only in a further step, under specific circumstances, does this We turn into a manifest group that engages in shared action. In the case of schoolchildren in a schoolyard, it takes, for instance, a ball thrown among them to trigger collective intentionality. In another occasion, it may suffice to turn on the music and people will start to dance. In small groups, simultaneous stimuli like music, a moving ball, sudden rainfall or an accident can trigger collective intentionality and shared action. Such events create simultaneity and a common focus. In larger groups or imagined communities, it is again the media that create this effect. Anderson underscores the synchronizing effect of mass media: “The obsolescence of the newspaper on the morrow of its printing […] creates this extraordinary mass ceremony: the almost precisely simultaneous consumption ('imagining ') of the newspaper-as-fiction” (Anderson 1983, p. 35). Newspapers, like any mass media, make sure an event is shared and experienced as shared, as Verba observed in the case of the assassination crisis in 1963:

It may not be the event itself that is most significant for this ceremonial aspect […]; the fact that the reaction to the event was shared seems more important. It was in many cases shared by families gathered around television sets, it was shared in church services and other community ceremonials, but it was intensely and widely shared through the media themselves. Not only were the emotions of individual Americans involved, but they were made clearly aware of the emotions of their fellow Americans (Verba 1965, pp. 354, 355).

Violent incidents such as an assassination, shared through media, frequently serve as triggers of collective intentionality. Examples of politically consequential assassinations are legion: Olof Palme, Benno Ohnesorg, Vladimir Herzog, Jerzy Popiełuszko, Theo van Gogh, you name it.

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The basic principle behind the phenomenon of collective intentionality is synchronization. Media create a sense of shared attention and “simultaneity in ‘homogeneous, empty time’” (Anderson 1983, p. 25). The sharing of a violent incident via mass media has quite the same effect as a ball thrown among a group of schoolchildren or music switched on in the presence of a group of dancers: Individual minds are, synchronically, directed to a common focus, just like undirected metal splinters coming into a magnetic field. If a synchronizing factor hits upon the background condition of a pre-conscious groupawareness, an undirected sense of We gives way to a state of collective intentionality. The We becomes manifest reality. Ideas as collective imaginations give structure and stability to collective actors. They allow a collective to share action beyond a short-term focusing event. Shared imagination constitutes a common cognitive space and collective intentionality allows moving jointly through this space, along the collectively imagined tracks. In a soccer game, this space and the tracks within it are circumscribed by the collectively known rules of the game and by the movement of the ball, which synchronizes the attention of all players. When dancing a tango, the shared knowledge of the dance form and the right moves prescribe the path of action to take by the dancers and the pace of the music allows synchronizing attention and action. In large groups, collective imaginaries provide a shared cognitive space, the tracks of action, on which a collective actor is moving. Just as a dancing couple moves to the rhythm of music, imagined communities move, synchronically, along their shared path to the rhythm of rites, ceremonies, holidays and calendars. Imagination and collective intentionality are both necessary conditions for collective action to emerge in large groups. Institutions are, basically, social devices that reproduce ideas as collective imaginations and provide synchronizing mechanism like ceremonies and bell towers. Through these mechanisms, they are capable of modifying individual structures of motivation in a way that induces dispositions for collective action. In the final part of this paper, I will shortly sketch how to apply this conception of ideas in empirical institutional analysis.

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Ideas in institutional analysis

Imagination and collective intentionality provide a mechanism that turns ideas into movers of institutional development, from switchmen to engine drivers. They afford theoretical underpinning to the claim that ideas change individuals’ “most basic preferences and very identity” (Hall and Taylor, 1996, p. 948). The insight that ideas move institutional development gives rise to new questions to be addressed in empirical analysis: On what kind of collective imaginary does an institution rest? How is this social imaginary communicated and sustained? What are its core elements – the conception of a We, the common goals and tracks of action? What kinds of events or triggers bring about states of collective intentionality? What kinds of rituals and practices serve to synchronize individual minds and to stabilize collective action? Institutional origin as well as institutional change derive from the level of imagination. Established institutions exist mainly in the kind of imaginations, although symbols and artefacts give them an appearance of material reality and continuity. To become visible and effective, collective intentionality has to be triggered by spontaneous or recurring stimuli. In the latter case, essential elements of the common imaginary are focused on ritualized, symbolically charged events such as public holidays or elections. Often, these events are mistaken as the actual essence of institutions. In fact, a symbol, an event or any stimulus that triggers collective intentionality, draws its effect from an idea, a pre-constituted collective imaginary. We-intentions only emerge if a We is constituted on the level of imagination. Democracy is such an idea. The desire to elect a new parliament on Election Day or to “kick the rascals out” does not emerge from the fact of elections. It is predicated on an idea about a government, about some proper procedures and, above all, about “a people” as a collective actor. Without such an idea, the annunciation of an event called “elections” by some individuals calling themselves “government” would not make sense to citizens and even less provide a reason for action; collective intentionality and, therefore, motivation on the level of individual voters would not arise. Institutional analysis, therefore, has to start with ideas. While ideational institutionalists conceive of ideas mostly as derivative from desires and interests, they are, in fact, prior to them and necessary for desires and interests to emerge in the first place. Institutional facts and specific outcomes can only be explained by referring to an underlying imaginary. This may be illustrated by an emblematic case of institutional emergence in recent times, the German Green party. This case may by itself not provide prove of the foregoing suppositions, but it can serve to illustrate the role of ideas in institutional development.

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The outward, formal existence of the German Greens started with the party’s foundation in 1980. Its ideational development, however, can be traced back to the 1960s at least, and it has two main tributaries: The environmental movement and the student movement, both of which disposed of a fully elaborated collective imaginary well before 1980. Although these two ideational branches are themselves far from homogenous, they both involve a set of identifiable building blocks such as a conception of We and a core of paradigmatic convictions. The first of the two strands of ideas developed around the topic of environmental degradation and limits to growth. The development of this collective imaginary originates in the early 1960s with Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” which was intensely discussed in Germany and already appeared in translation in 1963. From this moment on, citizens started to perceive environmental pollutions no longer as isolated and manageable problems, but as existential threats of a global dimension. By the early 1970s, when Dennis Meadows’ “Limits of Growth” appeared, the idea of humanity destroying its own, limited living space had become mainstream. The “blue marble” picture taken by the Apollo 17 mission reinforced the imagination of an overcrowded “spaceship earth” getting to the limits of its carrying capacity (Eckersley 1992; Hajer 2002; Cotgrove 1982). Against this ideational background, people started to look differently at their environment. New highways, power plants, navigation canals, but also smaller projects of urban development were perceived as steps towards the abyss of global collapse and triggered a wave of local initiatives. Protest groups sprang up across Germany and successively integrated into a broad environmental movement (Koopmans 1995). Toward the end of the 1970s, this movement faced exhaustion and parts of it decided to institutionalize into a Green party. Considering the sequencing and specificities of this development, it becomes clear that not perceptions (of instances of environmental degradation, which, to be sure, existed, but they had also existed before) gave way to sense-making ideas, but, to the contrary, the ideational foundations had developed well before any protest movement sprang up. In cases of large protest events, participants travelled long ways to the actual sites of environmental danger – atomic plants, waste incineration plants, chemical factories. Most of the protesters were not directly affected by these facilities. Instead, they purposefully sought real world referents to fit their imaginary stemming from an increasing flood of publications on the matter.18 Therefore, the actual motivational cause behind the environmental movement and, by extension, the foundation of the Greens in 1980s, is an ideational one - the idea of an endangered humanity on a fragile “spaceship earth”. Still, an image of the earth resembling the “blue

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The first wave of environmental literature came from the United States (e.g. Carson et al. 2002; Ehrlich 1989). Later on, German environmentalists came up with their own contributions (e.g. Strohm 2011; Vester 1975).

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marble” appears at party assemblies and on election posters. Specific protest issues only provided a common focus and an instance of synchronizing the collective imaginary in an experience of collective intentionality, strongly felt in mass demonstrations. The second strand of ideas that led to the foundation of the Greens in Germany originated in the student movement of 1968 and the New Left. Without going into details, I will show that in this case too, a collective imaginary was created well before any mobilization occurred. The imaginary of the New Left built on Marxist traditions, but within the German context, came to include some innovative elements that facilitated its partial merger with the environmental movement. One such element was the image of the German state as revenant of the totalitarian Nazi state and, therefore, as the pivotal enemy of the young generation of students. The decade that preceded the large-scale mobilizations of 1967 and 1968 constituted an incubation period in which the idea of a seamless continuation of the Nazi regime into the Federal Republic gained broad currency in university cycles. The idea that behind democratic institutions a more subtle type of totalitarianism was looming appears in a broad range of texts (Rusinek 2000; Schmidtke 2008). An important ideational source was the sociological discourse of critical theory, especially Adorno’s work about the authoritarian personality that, supposedly, embodied the continuation of the past. It became a cornerstone of the collective imaginary that developed among activists at German universities, especially in Berlin. This imaginary fed itself from a broadening stream of public discourse about hidden perpetrators of Nazi crimes, from judges to members of government and all the way to university professors. By 1967, when the shooting of the student Benno Ohnesorg by a police officer in Berlin triggered a broad protest movement, a strong, integrated collective imaginary was in place. The collective We was conceived as a global resistance movement against imperialism and, in the specific German case, against a supposedly fascist state. Following the concepts of Frantz Fanon and Che Guevara, the protesting students saw themselves as a part of a global revolutionary uprising. Only against the background of this imaginary could the killing in Berlin be attributed to a “repressive, fascist state” and the following mourning and protests be perceived as resistance by a revolutionary movement (Klimke 2010).19 The focusing event of the killing and its synchronizing effect turned the imagined We into a broad movement that spread across German universities and that persisted into 1968, when an attempt on the life of student leader Rudi Dutschke provided another trigger. Imagination turned into

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In fact, the police officer who shot Ohnesorg later turned out to have been an agent for the GDR’s secret service.

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action, or as the French student movement proclaimed, somewhat optimistically: “L'imagination prend le pouvoir”. A crucial and uniquely German development took place during the 1970s with the partial convergence of the two imaginaries around the issue of nuclear power, giving rise to perhaps the “strongest and most persistent anti-nuclear movement in the world” (Koopmans 1995, p. 158). Local protests against the planned expansion of nuclear power generation provided public attention for this issue. Leftist groups that had disintegrated after 1968 jumped on this train and soon the protests took on a national dimension (Joppke 1993). The nuclear issue proved compatible with and allowed its integration into both the New Left’s and the environmentalist’s imaginary, albeit in quite different ways. In the ranks of the left, nuclear plants and the state’s efforts to shield the building sites became a powerful symbol of the “Atomstaat”, a repressive, militarized state as agent of a civil-military nuclear complex (Jungk 1979).20 For environmentalists, on the other hand, nuclear plants perfectly symbolized the apocalyptic imaginations of a world destroyed by human hubris and shortsightedness. Between 1974 and 1977, the new nuclear strategy of the social democratic government provided a string of protest occasions that allowed impressive instances of collective intentionality and, in turn, focused the attention of the broader public. Around 1980, the nuclear issue had received an important twist with the NATO’s decision to deploy tactical nuclear missiles in Germany, which facilitated the integration of the peace movement into the anti-nuclear movement. The claim about an intrinsic connection between military and civil use of nuclear technology, purported by the New Left and the Atomstaat-theory, received new confirmation. When the Greens were founded in 1980 on the national level, the nuclear issue was, by far, the single most important motivation for members and activists, many of whom came from anti-nuclear protest groups (Rüdig 1990). With the form of an official party and parliamentary representation, the motivational force of collective imaginaries became somewhat superseded by institutional incentives and mitigated by the entry of new, more pragmatic members. The relevance of ideas became periodically visible in conflicts about issues such as parliamentary coalitions, German re-unification or participation in the NATO bombings in Kosovo in 1999 that resulted in a range of splits and exits from the party. Still, the nuclear issue provoked strong reactions even three decades after the movement’s golden era. It was Germany where the biggest mobilizations worldwide occurred after the atomic incident in Fukushima, Japan, in 2011 – on the opposite side of the planet. Obviously, any utility-based explanation must fail in this case. It can only be explained by the high symbolic value of the nuclear issue in the context of a collective                                                              20

Early on, analogies between fences around nuclear building sites and concentration camps were drawn.

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imaginary dating back to the origins of the New Left and the ecological movement and institutionally reproduced by the Greens. It would, therefore, be misplaced to relegate the motivational force of ideas to an institution’s difficult starting period while in later periods, material incentives, social norms and coordinative equilibria suffice to maintain the institutional structure. While these latter factors play an increasingly more important role in mature institutions, ideational sources of motivation are still required to sustain them. This ideational scaffold is built of continuously reproduced ideas and recurrent stimuli. Just as the limbs of the body, an institution, or rather, the collective imaginary it embodies, has to be used and activated from time to time to avoid degradation. Without being activated, the collective imaginary is diluted. This becomes evident when institutions suddenly break down in moments of crisis because the necessary ideational foundation has disappeared. Although the case of the German Greens may appear very specific, it illustrates well the importance of ideas for the emergence and development of institutions. Similar developments are described by George Mosse (1975) in the case of German nation building. In the course of the 19th century, a collective imaginary developed around a collective identity that originated with the Napoleonic wars. It was reinforced by writers, poets and song-writers, who worked to develop, expand and spread this collective imaginary to create powerful symbols and to embed it in everyday practices. Only on the basis of this ideational process did subsequent institutional developments – national integration under Bismarck, WWI, Weimar, the Third Reich, and, ultimately, also the Federal Republic – become possible. These examples show what it means to put ideas at the center of institutional analysis. In the first place, the focus of attention shifts from formal structures and instances of collective actions to a previous process of cognitive structuration. An institutional analysis that starts with formal institution building overlooks a crucial factor: the ideational foundations on which any type of collective action rests. An explanation of how a collective comes to act together to bring structures into being that thereafter provide incentives for cooperation has to include an answer to the question of how the respective collective came into being in the first place: How an imagined We and a collective imaginary emerged. Usually, such an analysis does not require digging out new facts. Rather, it supposes a reappreciation of already established facts, as in the case of the German Greens, whose ideational roots are well known. Alone, there is no way of integrating them systematically into institutional analysis as long as a rationalist-individualistic account of motivation remains in place. The combination of imagination and collective intentionality allows going beyond such individualistic accounts and 24   

appreciating the importance of thinking and acting in the We-mode. Such a change of perspective dramatically sheds new light on ideational developments so far only considered as kinds of accessories to institutional developments. Integrating the formation of a collective imaginary into institutional analysis enables one to look at collective action, institutionalization and institutional change in a fundamentally different way.

Conclusion

Understanding the elementary structures of social life, institutions, requires a modification of basic parameters of individual intentionality and motivation. Without denying aspects of utility and path dependency, which are indeed highly important as soon as it comes to institutional reproduction, I regard it essential to address the motivational side of institutions to get the full picture. Institutions are not only about choice (including transaction costs and norms), but also about volition. In an institutional context, we do things we otherwise would not intend to do – paying taxes, voting in an election, fighting an enemy or singing a national anthem. Institutions, therefore, are not only devices that direct individual desires onto certain tracks and maybe suppress or modify them by norms and sanctions, they are, rather, motivational factors in their own right, which create desires we would otherwise not have. This effect of institutions derives from ideas. The basic aim of this paper was to carve out the underlying mechanisms on the level of intentionality and motivation. In the first step, I argued that intentions need not to be bound to perceptions, but that they can also occur in the realm of imagination, which allows for the emergence of imagined communities. For imaginations to become manifest actions, two additional hurdles had to be surpassed, the condition of self-efficacy and the condition of intentional control. In small groups, self-efficacy is afforded by common knowledge while intentional control derives form bodily awareness. In large groups, motivation arises from collective intentionality. Intentional control shifts from individual bodily awareness to a kind of collective body. Thanks to this mechanism, actions are no longer perceived as individual contributions to a collective goal, but as inherently collective experiences. Based on this mechanism, institutions become enabling tools that allow intentionality and action to transcend perceptual and bodily limitations. As such, they are able to create desires. Thus, individual beliefs and desires are not stable parameters of institutional development. Rather, they emerge and change in institutional contexts. Ideas are not tools of sense-making and of pursuing individual goals, but they are in themselves constitutive of individual motivation for action. Institutional analysis, therefore, should focus on ideational foundations and the triggers that produce 25   

collective intentionality. Spontaneous triggers like assassinations are powerful synchronizing mechanisms but they are rather impractical in everyday institutional life. They are, however, reproduced in commemorations and national holidays. Elections are secular rites that create a common focus and activate, synchronically, the basic ideas underlying democratic institutions. This mechanism is predicated on a common imaginary, based on pre-reflective group awareness. It is not events such as elections or public holidays themselves, but the underlying imaginaries that give life and substance to an institution. This imaginative force remains invisible most of the time. It only appears sporadically in moments of collective intentionality. To restrict institutional analysis to structures and manifest interactions means taking the form for the substance and mistaking the conditions of institutional development. For instance, institutional degradation is not immediately apparent from visible structures. Institutions may keep on functioning as ideationally bled zombies for a while, sustained by structures of power and historical inertia, but, eventually, the ideational void becomes felt and they suddenly break down. Recognizing the motivational effects of ideas based on the mechanisms of imagination and collective intentionality may help to understand these developments better. It also provides theoretical underpinning for an emerging ideational institutionalism.

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