Institution

In ordinary language, institutions signify core concepts of governance, such as the executive, parliament, and judiciary. In current political science, institutions take a broader meaning. They are formal rules (including constitutions), informal norms, and shared understandings that constrain and prescribe political actors' interactions with one another. Institutions are generated and enforced by both state and nonstate actors (such as professional and accreditation bodies). Within institutional frameworks, actors may have more or less freedom to pursue and develop their individual preferences and tastes.

Institutions have always been a major subject of social science research, particularly in political science and sociology. Their importance has been reinforced, since the 1980s, with the emergence of new institutionalism and its intellectual streams—rational choice, historical, normative, and sociological institutional theories.

Why do actors adhere to institutions? From a rational choice institutional perspective, with its instrumentalist logic, people follow norms because they want to avoid sanctions and maximize rewards. For instance, members of parliament, in a parliamentary regime with closed-list elections, are more likely to adhere to norms of party discipline, in hopes of being remunerated with a future executive position, than are members of the U.S. Congress, who are less dependent on the president for their future political career.

Normative institutionalism, however, explains actors' adherence to norms in reference to their perception of some actions as appropriate or inappropriate for people in their role. For instance, a minister may resign as a result of a crisis related to her ministerial department, following an informal norm of proper behavior in such circumstances, regardless of whether she perceives this action as instrumental to her future reelection prospects.

Sociological institutionalists claim that the strength of some institutions results from their taken-for-granted nature: Actors adhere to norms because they cannot conceive an alternative form of action. For example, a prime minister may respond to a political crisis by nominating an independent public inquiry, headed by a supreme court judge, because this has become the standard response to instances of crises.

Institutions have been shown to have a major impact on political processes and outcomes. Rational choice institutionalists emphasize institutions' role in shaping the degree of stability and change in a polity through the determination of the number of players whose consent is necessary for a change in the status quo. Historical institutionalists highlight institutions' path-dependent effect, whereby the contingent choice of one institution over another—for example, private over public provision of pensions—results in actors' investment in adaptation to the selected institution and therefore in its durability and in stable divergence of countries' institutional forms. Conversely, normative [Page 449]and sociological institutionalists explain the convergence of governance regimes across counties (for example, privatization and the new public management reforms) as a result of the legitimacy of these institutional forms.