This article provides an overview of recent developments in historical institutionalism. First, it reviews some distinctions that are commonly drawn between the ihistoricali and the irational choicei variants of institutionalism and shows that there are more points of tangency than typically assumed. However, differences remain in how scholars in the two traditions approach empirical problems. The contrast of rational choiceis emphasis on institutions as coordination mechanisms that generate or sustain equilibria versus historical institutionalismis emphasis on how institutions emerge from and are embedded in concrete temporal processes serves as the foundation for the second half of the essay, which assesses our progress in understanding institutional formation and change. Drawing on insights from recent historical institutional work on icritical juncturesi and on ipolicy feedbacks,i the article proposes a way of thinking about institutional evolution and path dependency that provides an alternative to equilibrium and other approaches that separate the analysis of institutional stability from that of institutional change.

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Historical institutionalism in comparative politics

In 1974 an article appeared in Science magazine with the dry-sounding title “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases” by a pair of psychologists who were not well known outside their discipline of decision theory. In it Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman introduced the world to Prospect Theory, which mapped out how humans actually behave when faced with decisions about gains and losses, in contrast to how economists assumed that people behave. Prospect Theory turned Economics on its head by demonstrating through a series of ingenious experiments that people are much more concerned with losses than they are with gains, and that framing a choice from one perspective or the other will result in decisions that are exactly the opposite of each other, even if the outcomes are monetarily the same. Prospect Theory led cognitive psychology in a new direction that began to uncover other human biases in thinking that are probably not learned but are part of our brain’s wiring.

Thinking fast and slow.

Political economists have always been interested in the differences in economic and political institutions that occur across countries. Some regard these differences as deviations from 'best practice' that will dissolve as nations catch up to a technological or organizational leader. Others see them as the distillation of more durable historical choices for a specific kind of society, since economic institutions condition levels of social protection, the distribution of income, and the availability of collective goods — features of the social solidarity of a nation. In each case, comparative political economy revolves around the conceptual frameworks used to understand institutional variation across nations. On such frameworks depend the answers to a range of important questions. Some are policy-related. What kind of economic policies will improve the performance of the economy? What will governments do in the face of economic challenges? What defines a state's capacities to meet such challenges? Other questions are firm-related. Do companies located in different nations display systematic differences in their structure and strategies? If so, what inspires such differences? How can national differences in the pace or character of innovation be explained? Some are issues about economic performance. Do some sets of institutions provide lower rates of inflation and unemployment or higher rates of growth than others? What are the trade-offs in terms of economic performance to developing one type of political economy rather than another? Finally, second-order questions about institutional change and stability are of special significance today. Can we expect technological progress and the competitive pressures of globalization to inspire institutional conver-gence? What factors condition the adjustment paths a political economy takes in the face of such challenges? The object of this book is to elaborate a new framework for understanding the institutional similarities and differences among the developed economies, one that offers a new and intriguing set of answers to 1111 211 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10111 1 211 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40 1 such questions. 1 We outline the basic approach in this Introduction. Subsequent chapters extend and apply it to a wide range of issues. In many respects, this approach is still a work-in-progress. We see it as a set of contentions that open up new research agendas rather than settled wisdom to be accepted …

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An Introduction to Varieties of Capitalism

Extensive empirical evidence and theoretical developments in multiple disciplines stimulate a need to expand the range of rational choice models to be used as a foundation for the study of social dilemmas and collective action. After an introduction to the problem of overcoming social dilemmas through collective action, the remainder of this article is divided into six sections. The first briefly reviews the theoretical predictions of currently accepted rational choice theory related to social dilemmas. The second section summarizes the challenges to the sole reliance on a complete model of rationality presented by extensive experimental research. In the third section, I discuss two major empirical findings that begin to show how individuals achieve results that are “better than rational” by building conditions where reciprocity, reputation, and trust can help to overcome the strong temptations of short-run self-interest. The fourth section raises the possibility of developing second-generation models of rationality, the fifth section develops an initial theoretical scenario, and the final section concludes by examining the implications of placing reciprocity, reputation, and trust at the core of an empirically tested, behavioral theory of collective action.

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A Behavioral Approach to the Rational Choice Theory of Collective Action: Presidential Address, American Political Science Association, 1997

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

Many of the fundamental questions in social science entail an examination of the role played by social institutions. Why do we have so many social institutions? Why do they take one form in one society and quite different ones in others? In what ways do these institutions develop? When and why do they change? Institutions and Social Conflict addresses these questions in two ways. First it offers a thorough critique of a wide range of theories of institutional change, from the classical accounts of Smith, Hume, Marx and Weber to the contemporary approaches of evolutionary theory, the theory of social conventions and the new institutionalism. Secondly, it develops a new theory of institutional change that emphasises the distributional consequences of social institutions. The emergence of institutions is explained as a by-product of distributional conflict in which asymmetries of power in a society generate institutional solutions to conflicts.

Institutions and Social Conflict

What role do courts play in the establishment and maintenance of constitutional democracies? To address this question, we elaborate a model that draws on existing substantive literature and on theories that assume strategic behavior on the part of judges, executives, and legislatures. This model, in turn, leads to several behavioral predictions about the interactions among the relevant political actors. Although those predictions could be assessed in many distinct contexts, we focus on Russia. In particular, we provide a demonstration of how the model helps make sense of the behavior of the Constitutional Court (Konstitucjonnyj sud) in light of the difficult political situation it confronted. We conclude with some thoughts on the broader implications of our theory for the study of courts throughout Eastern Europe and how it may well illuminate constitutional politics in other parts of the world. Before World War II, few European States had constitutional courts, and virtually none exercised any significant judicial review over legislation. After 1945 all that changed. West Germany, Italy, Austria, Cyprus, Turkey, Yugoslavia, Greece, Spain, Portugal and even France . . created tribunals with power to annul legislative enactments inconsistent with constitutional requirements. Many of these courts have become significant-even powerful-actors. -Herman Schwartz (1992:741) European constitutional courts have created situations in which legislators feel obliged to enter into constitutional discourse, both an internal discourse and a discourse with the court, to make and to take seriously constitutional arguments, and to cast and recast statutory language in the light of potential constitutional objections. -Martin Shapiro & Alec Stone (1994b:417) [T]here is an expansion of judicial power afoot in the world's political systems. -C. Neal Tate (1995:27) Today, at the end of the twentieth century, it is scarcely possible to recount, much less understand, the major political and social developments in industrial societies without attention to legal norms, courts and judges. -Sally J. Kenney, William A Reisinger & John C. Reitz (1999:1) These quotes, from legal academics and social scientists alike, are just the tip of the iceberg. Indeed, for more than a decade now, the community of law and society scholars has acknowledged the "active role" courts are playing "in ensuring the supremacy of constitutional principles" (Henckaerts & Van der Jeught 1998) and in democratization efforts throughout the world, but especially in Eastern Europe. This expansion of judicial power-or what some term the "judicialization of politics" (Tate & Vallinder 1995a) raises whole sets of intriguing questions, and unanswered questions at that.1 For, despite an acknowledgment of their importance, we "know precious little," as Gibson et al. (1998) recently lamented, "about the judicial and legal systems in countries outside the United States. We understand little or nothing about the degree to which various judiciaries are politicized; how judges make decisions; how, whether, and to what extent those decisions are implemented; how ordinary citizens influence courts, if at all; or what effect courts have on institutions and cultures" (p. 343). Certainly no single research endeavor can fill all the voids Gibson and his colleagues identify. What we do instead is tackle one question, albeit one that is of core concern to the Gibson team, as well as to many others laboring in this field: What role do constitutional courts play in the establishment and maintenance of democracies? For judicial specialists, this question is of obvious significance, having served as a focal point for studies on the U.S. Supreme Court for over four decades (Casper 1976; Dahl 1957; Gates 1992; Rosenberg 1991). But there are at least two other groups for which our question might resonate. …

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The Role of Constitutional Courts in the Establishment and Maintenance of Democratic Systems of Government

Aggregation and Deliberation: On the Possibility of Democratic Legitimacy:

Theory: Precedent might affect Supreme Court decision making in a number of ways. One conception, the conventional view scrutinized by Segal and Spaeth, sees precedent as the primary reason why justices make the decisions that they do. A second regards precedent as a normative constraint on justices acting on their personal preferences. On this account, justices have a preferred rule that they would like to establish in the case before them, but they strategically modify their position to take account of a norm favoring respect for precedent in order to produce a decision as close as is possible to their preferred outcome. Hypothesis: If precedent is a norm, researchers would be unlikely to detect its presence by conventional examinations of the vote. Rather, it would manifest itself throughout the decision making process in some of the following ways: attorneys' attention to precedent and justices' appeals to and respect for the doctrine. Methods: Counts of attorneys' use of authorities in written briefs, of justices' appeals to precedent during conference discussion, of justices' invocation of precedent in their opinions, anid of the Court's alterations of stare decisis. Results: Since the data support our account of stare decisis as a norm that structures judicial decisions, we question research designs that focus solely on how precedent affects the disposition of cases.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2111740.pdf

The Norm of Stare Decisis

Much has been written on change in social norms, but with few exceptions such efforts have failed to synthesize the growing theoretical literature with the specifics of empirical cases. Attempting such a synthesis, we develop a theoretical framework for explaining norm emergence and change that builds on Barth's idea of generative models. We identify three mechanisms offered in the contemporary theoretical literature to account for the dynamic process of norm change: (I) coordination on focal points, (2) competitive selection among contracts, and (3) bargaining. We investigate three examples of norm change among the Galole Orma - common property rights, bridewealth, and clan exogamy - and show that examination of strategic decision making within the constraints presented by social context can produce adequate accounts of such change. We conclude that the primary mechanism in norm change among the Orma is bargaining and that the most important sources of such change are asymmetries in bargaining power.

Jack Knight

Papers

Institutions and Social Conflict

The Role of Constitutional Courts in the Establishment and Maintenance of Democratic Systems of Government

Aggregation and Deliberation: On the Possibility of Democratic Legitimacy:

The Norm of Stare Decisis

Changing Social Norms: Common Property, Bridewealth, and Clan Exogamy