Evolution of Institutions or Institutional Change?

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to analyze the practices of using the expression "evolution of institutions" in the study of institutions to denote the processes and mechanisms of their emergence and change. Very often this means that the authors consider these processes and their mechanisms to be similar to those that operate within the framework of Darwinian biological evolution. Since the emergence and changes of institutions have been studied and investigated outside the evolutionary approach for a long time, the question arises as to what new scientific knowledge about these processes has allowed and allows the evolutionary approach to be obtained? To answer this question, the article considers, firstly, the results of a non-evolutionary study of institutional dynamics, and secondly, the results of various versions of its evolutionary research, including an approach based on the concept of cultural evolution. The analysis showed that evolutionary approaches to the emergence of institutions affect only one of the three established mechanisms of these processes, and evolutionary concepts of institutional change have a number of inaccuracies and inaccuracies. These results give grounds to conclude that in the field of studying institutions, the evolutionary approach has not led (yet?) to develop new knowledge about their origin and change, which could not be obtained outside of this approach. The theories of institutional dynamics available today provide reliable grounds for theoretical and empirical study of the processes of their emergence and change without using analogies with biological and cultural evolutionary theories.