Institutionalization

Concepts and Mechanisms of Institutionalization

Any discussion of institutionalization needs to be based on an understanding of the term institution. At the most general level, we can think of institutions as “patterned behavior,” as relatively stable, valued sets of formal and informal rules, norms, and practices that constrain but also enable political behavior. In short, institutions give structure to political life, but they also emerge from actor-based social and political processes. A key question for political scientists then is not only to what extent institutional structures shape or even determine individual political behavior and processes but also to what degree actors can purposefully create, design, or mold institutions to serve their needs or interests. This duality of actor (or agency) and structure lies at the heart of institutionalization research.

There is considerable disagreement among different schools of new institutionalism about the role of institutions and about the drivers and mechanisms of institutionalization. The most important divide runs between rational choice institutionalism and sociological (or organizational or normative) institutionalism. In the rational choice approach, institutions are essentially “rules of the game” that emerge as the result of political choice by self-interested actors, be it to solve collective action problems or to advance specific interests. This suggests that institutional arrangements are rather malleable and open to design. A typical approach in this vein is the principal–agent framework: Political principals create and delegate powers to administrative or international agents to perform certain functions or to entrench their policy preferences. Yet organizational arrangements can be stabilized, or institutionalized, through mechanisms of “lock-in,” based on the logic of increasing returns: Actors have an incentive to stay on a path of institutional development once it is chosen not because it is functionally superior but because they are rewarded by positive feedbacks, such as learning and coordination benefits. Historical institutionalism makes a similar argument about the lock-in effect of choices (at critical junctures) in the formative period of institutions (“path dependency”). However, it gives more importance to the role of ideas in sustaining institutional trajectories. This constructivist component brings historical institutionalism closer to sociological institutionalism.

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