Mainstream comparative research on political institutions focuses primarily on formal rules. Yet in many contexts, informal institutions, ranging from bureaucratic and legislative norms to clientelism and patrimonialism, shape even more strongly political behavior and outcomes. Scholars who fail to consider these informal rules of the game risk missing many of the most important incentives and constraints that underlie political behavior. In this article we develop a framework for studying informal institutions and integrating them into comparative institutional analysis. The framework is based on a typology of four patterns of formal-informal institutional interaction: complementary, accommodating, competing, and substitutive. We then explore two issues largely ignored in the literature on this subject: the reasons and mechanisms behind the emergence of informal institutions, and the nature of their stability and change. Finally, we consider challenges in research on informal institutions, including issues of identification, measurement, and comparison.Gretchen Helmke's book Courts Under Constraints: Judges, Generals, and Presidents in Argentina, will be published by Cambridge University Press. Steven Levitsky is the author of Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective and is currently writing a book on competitive authoritarian regimes in the post–Cold War era. The authors thank the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University and the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame for generously sponsoring conferences on informal institutions. The authors also gratefully acknowledge comments from Jorge Dominguez, Anna Grzymala-Busse, Dennis Galvan, Goran Hyden, Jack Knight, Lisa Martin, Hillel Soifer, Benjamin Smith, Susan Stokes, Maria Victoria Murillo, and Kurt Weyland, as well as three anonymous reviewers and the editors of Perspectives on Politics.

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Informal institutions and comparative politics: a research agenda

Inclusion and democracy.

Preface 1. Introduction: the problem of collective action 2. The prisoners' dilemma, chicken and other games in the provision of public goods 3. The two-person prisoners' dilemma supergame 4. The N-person prisoners' dilemma supergame 5. Altruism and superiority 6. The state 7. Epilogue: cooperation, the state and anarchy Annex Notes Bibliography Index.

The possibility of cooperation

At the heart of attitudinal and strategic explanations of judicial behavior is the assumption that justices have policy preferences. In this paper we employ Markov chain Monte Carlo methods to fit a Bayesian measurement model of ideal points for all justices serving on the U.S. Supreme Court from 1953 through 1999. We are particularly interested in determining to what extent ideal points of justices change throughout their tenure on the Court. This is important because judicial politics scholars oftentimes invoke preference measures that are time invariant. To investigate preference change, we posit a dynamic item response model that allows ideal points to change systematically over time. Additionally, we introduce Bayesian methods for fitting multivariate dynamic linear models to political scientists. Our results suggest that many justices do not have temporally constant ideal points. Moreover, our ideal point estimates outperform existing measures and explain judicial behavior quite well across civil rights, civil liberties, economics, and federalism cases.

/pdf/dynamic-ideal-point-estimation-via-markov-chain-monte-carlo-39e3lfzyfr.pdf

Dynamic Ideal Point Estimation via Markov Chain Monte Carlo for the U.S. Supreme Court, 1953-1999

Political scientists are often called upon to estimate models in which the standard assumption that the data are conditionally independent can be called into question I review the method of generalized estimating equations (GEE) for dealing with such correlated data The GEE approach offers a number of advantages to researchers interested in modeling correlated data, including applicability to data in which the outcome variable takes on a wide range of forms In addition, GEE models allow for substantial flexibility in specifying the correlation structure within cases and offer the potential for valuable substantive insights into the nature of that correlation Moreover, GEE models are estimable with many currently available software packages, and the interpretation of model estimates is identical to that for commonly used models for uncorrelated data (eg, logit and probit) I discuss practical issues relating to the use of GEE models and illustrate their usefulness for analyzing correlated data through three applications in political science mpirical political science is most often interested in estimating the effect of some set of explanatory covariates on an outcome variable of interest At the same time, in many cases, the data on which we observe the phenomena of interest are likely to be correlated The most common instances of correlated data are those involving repeated observations over time, either in the form of panel studies or time-series of crosssections1 Correlated data can also arise in other ways, including dyadic studies (eg, Oneal and Russett 1997; Hojnacki and Kimball 1998; Huckfeldt, Sprague, and Levine 2000) and examinations of individual decisions in a collegial context, for example, voting decisions in a legislature (eg, Levitt 1996; Snyder and Groseclose 2000) or a court (eg, Traut and Emmert 1998) While issues relating to temporal correlation have recently received a good deal of attention among political scientists (Beck and Katz 1995; Beck, Katz, and Tucker 1998; Box-Steffensmeier and Jones 1997; see also Stimson 1985), the latter form of correlation often goes unaddressed Moreover, few of the methods for dealing with correlation over time are appropriate for use with data where the interdependence is not of a temporal nature, and fewer still are capable of dealing with noncontinuous dependent variables (for example, dichotomous variables or event counts) In this article, I review a general method for dealing with correlated data: the technique of generalized estimating equations (GEEs)2 GEEs of-

Generalized Estimating Equation Models for Correlated Data: A Review with Applications

Almost one-fourth of the members of the lower house in Italy, the Chamber of Deputies, switched parties at least once between 1996 and 2001. Why would a legislator abandon one party and enter another during a legislative term? Starting from the basic assumption that politicians are ambitious, we examine electoral and partisan motivations for members of parliament (MPs) who switch parties. We conclude that party switching most likely is motivated by party labels that provide little information about policy goals and that pit copartisans against each other in the effort to serve constituent needs. Switching is especially frequent when ambitious politicians operate under heightened uncertainty.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1111/j.1468-2508.2005.00328.x

Party Switching in the Italian Chamber of Deputies, 1996–2001

Theory: When analysts adopt surrogates of actors' political preferences for purposes unanticipated by the inventors of those measures, they often stretch (but not explicitly assess) the range of reliability and validity. Hypotheses: The consequences pushing measures beyond their intended purposes may significantly impact research findings, as well as the conclusions drawn from those findings. Methods: "Methodological audit" of measures developed by Segal and Cover (1989) to represent the political preferences of justices on the United States Supreme Court. Mainly regression analysis using the Segal/Cover scores and vote data drawn from the United States Supreme Court Judicial Database. Results: Analysts would be well advised to weigh carefully whether adequate tests have been performed before adopting others' preference measures for their own research. More specific conclusions are: 1) scholars should invoke the Segal/Cover scores in the set of circumstances indicated by their developers: aggregated individual-level decisions in civil liberties cases; and 2) students of the judicial process who seek to explore phenomena other than aggregated individual-level voting in civil liberties cases ought to give serious thought to devising new surrogates for judicial preferences.

Measuring Political Preferences

Compared to U.S. political parties, parties in Italy (and Europe generally) are quite cohesive. Rarely do members of parliament vote against their copartisans in legislative divisions. Yet in Italy in recent years, legislators switch parties with seeming abandon. Between 1996 and spring 2000, one out of four deputies in the Chamber of Deputies switched parties at least once, compared to only 20 switches in the U.S. Congress from 1947 to 1997 (Nokken 2000). We examine the relationship between switching and observed party unity in Italy by focusing on individual legislators' switching decisions and voting behavior. Overall, switchers move out of highly disciplined parties, suggesting that they switch partly in order to escape strong discipline.

Dealing in Discipline: Party Switching and Legislative Voting in the Italian Chamber of Deputies, 1988–2000

Governments in Italy both change and remain the same. From 1946 to 1992 the Christian Democratic Party always held governing power. But almost no cabinet stayed in office more than a few years, and many governments collapsed after only a few months. How can instability coexist with stability in this way? How can governments break up at such low cost and with so little effect on alternation? These questions are rooted in—but not resolved by—the available game-theoretic literature on coalitional behavior. My answer is that politicians' purposive actions can reduce the costs of coalition. I argue that the costs of making, breaking, and maintaining coalitions depend on political institutions and on the array of parties and voters in policy space. Institutional and spatial conditions structure politicians' opportunities and attempts to lower costs. Under some conditions, as I show, coalitions are cheap, and politicians can easily make coalitions even cheaper. The inference is that this framework comprehends both Italy's extremes and the degrees of stability found in other parliamentary democracies.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0003055400207132

The Costs of Coalition: Coalition Theories and Italian Governments

The Costs of Coalition tackles big questions of enduring interest in real-world politics and in political science. The substantive aim of the book is to understand and explain who governs, and for how long, under the institutions of parliamentary democracy. Its epistemological purpose is to investigate the nature of political scientists' knowledge of coalitional behavior and how to advance it. The book starts from the well-known fact that governments in postwar Italy are extremely short-lived, and identifies a puzzle about coalition politics posed by the Italian experience. In postwar Italy until 1992, cabinets fell frequently but the same parties returned to office again and again. This book focuses on that stability-the perpetual incumbency of the Christian Democrats and the limited degree to which parties alternated between government and opposition in Italy. It probes how stability was tied to instability in Italian governments. It also compares Italian coalitions with those in nine other parliamentary democracies: Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden. The author argues that the costs and benefits of building and breaking coalitions vary in systematic ways. The variations arise in part from parties' deliberate efforts to redefine payoffs in coalition politics, and they also reflect the constraints and opportunities created by the institutions of parliamentary democracy and the configuration of the party system. Under some conditions, such as those in Italy, coalitions are cheap, and politicians can easily make coalitions cheaper. The picture of strategic behavior drawn in the book illuminates Italy's extremes and the degrees of stability found in other parliamentary democracies. In addition, the book advocates and embodies a rethinking of the relationship between game-theory literature in political science and empirical research on political institutions.

Carol Mershon

Papers

Party Switching in the Italian Chamber of Deputies, 1996–2001

Measuring Political Preferences

Dealing in Discipline: Party Switching and Legislative Voting in the Italian Chamber of Deputies, 1988–2000

The Costs of Coalition: Coalition Theories and Italian Governments

The Costs of Coalition