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, and 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".
Neo-Institutionalism; Behaviorism; History of Political Science; Political Institutions