Kosterich, Allie (2022). News nerds. Institutional change in Journalism. Oxford University Press

The pension funds have become America's new ‘tycoons’ – surely the most unlikely masters any society ever had. They have attained this position without any struggle, any crisis, any major ‘problems...

Institutional Theory and Institutional Change: Introduction to the Special Research Forum

<i>Varieties of Governance in China: Migration and Institutional Change in Chinese Villages</i>, by Jie Lu. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. xiv+298 pp. US$74.00, £51.00 (cloth).

Opioids, pain, and fear

This article investigates the historical impact of party and constituency preferences on tariff votes from the U.S. Senate over the period 1883--1930. We find that the estimated effect of party grows during periods in which legislative institutions favored strong parties. We conclude that party has a causal effect on policy. If party serves solely as a proxy for unmeasured components of personal ideology or constituency preferences, then the estimated effect of party on policy outcomes should not vary contemporaneously with changes in legislative institutions. But if party has an independent causal impact on policy outcomes, then changes in institutions favoring strong parties should lead to a greater effect of party on voting behavior, holding constituency preferences constant. Although our findings are limited to votes over tariffs in the 19th and early 20th centuries, they suggest that further research into the mechanism by which party affects political decision making is important. Copyright 2002, Oxford University Press.

Henry Farrell, The Political Economy of Trust: Institutions, Interests and Interfirm Cooperation in Italy and Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).Jeremy Leaman, The Political Economy of Germany under Chancellors Kohl and Schroeder: Decline of the German Model? (New York: Berghahn, 2009)Wolfgang Streeck, Re-Forming Capitalism: Institutional Change in the German Political Economy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009)

The term capitalism comes with a great deal of anachronistic, non-reflexive, non-deconstructed baggage. The ‘c word’ evokes the idea of a reified system with an immanent inner principle so that cap...

Rebecca Neaera Abers and Margaret E. Keck, Practical Authority: Agency and Institutional Change in Brazilian Water Politics (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. xxi+263, 34.95 pb. - Volume 46 Issue 3

Practical Authority: Agency and Institutional Change in Brazilian Water Politics. By Rebecca Neaera Abers and Margaret E. Keck. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 288p. 34.95 paper. - Volume 13 Issue 2

State Building in Crisis Governance: Donald Trump and COVID-19.

Universities can sharpen their commitment to democracy through institutional change. This might be resisted by a traditional understanding of universities. The question arises whether universities have defining purposes that demarcate possible university policy, strategic planning, and priority setting. These are significant questions because while universities are among our most stable long-term institutions, there is little consensus on what they are, what they are for, and what makes them valuable. This paper argues that universities can in fact be organized around a wide variety of purposes without thereby becoming any less real as universities. Normative discourse around universities should therefore be unafraid to consider novel ideas that test the limits of our current university concept and our entrenched practices. The argument applies fresh insights from feminist philosophy. Haslanger’s (Haslanger, S. 2000. Gender and race: (What) are they? (What) do we want them to be? Noûs 34(1), 31-55, Haslanger, S. 2005. What are we talking about? The semantics and politics of social kinds. Hypatia 20(4): 10-26, Haslanger, S. 2012. Resisting reality: Social construction and social critique. Oxford University Press.) ameliorative account of gender and race provides a model for how to frame novel and critical ideas about universities. Ásta’s (Ásta. 2018. Categories we live by: The construction of sex, gender, race, and other social categories. New York: Oxford University Press.) conferralist framework explains how universities are socially constructed and where our university concept, social behavior, and normative discourse fits into that construction. Stakeholders have the power to create the social fact of whether an institution is a university and what being a university means in each context. However, stakeholders are a heterogenous group and contemporary universities are fragmented institutions in desperate need for an ameliorative account that would guide their construction toward democratic value. That account can build on a distinction between valuing universities as expressions of democracy, its symbols, components, and causal agents.

BOOK REVIEWS

Reviewed by: Electing the Pope in Early Modern Italy, 1450–1700 by Miles Pattenden Maria Antonietta Visceglia Electing the Pope in Early Modern Italy, 1450–1700. By Miles Pattenden. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2017. Pp. xvi, 309. $112.50. ISBN 978-0-19-879744-9.) In his introduction, Miles Pattenden, author of an earlier work on the fate of the Carafa family after the death of Paul IV (Pius IV and the Fall of the Carafa: Nepotism and Papal Authority in Counter-Reformation Rome [Oxford University Press, 2013]), explains his approach to the subject of his present book: papal elections in the early modern age. Conclaves, the rules governing them, and their conflicts have recently received a good deal of attention from international scholars and especially in Italy. The author draws widely on available works but unlike other studies he makes it clear that his "aim is to present a holistic argument rather than to inform about the activity that took place in and around conclaves on its own terms" (p. 7). In keeping with this approach, which seeks to "capture" the essence of the conclave, the author has included a seventh chapter, immediately preceding the conclusion, which aims to consider "how the papacy's identity as an elective monarchy affected the development of the governmental practices that we commonly associate with early modern Absolutism" (p. 218). The sections of this chapter dealing with venality, the development of the papal bureaucracy, the legislative [End Page 362] activity of the popes as measured statistically (Table 7.1, p. 234), the phenomenon of public debt, and papal nepotism are rather descriptive, with few references to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. So the proposal to construct an interpretational theory of how papal institutions developed between 1500 and 1800 based on these categories and with the help of the ideas contained in Douglass North's Institutional Change and Economic Performance (Cambridge University Press, 1990) appears to be overly ambitious. Moreover, it might have been a better idea to locate this chapter—which the author intends to be strategic—at the beginning of the book. The work's contribution is essentially to be found in chapters 2–6, which focus on papal elections as a political process, identifying the motivations, skills, and results achieved by those who played a major role in them. As is well known, for centuries the bishops of the Roman Church were elected by the clergy and the people, and it was only in 1059 that Nicholas II decreed that the cardinals should be the sole electors of the pope, a measure that was confirmed in the Third Lateran council by Alexander III (1179, Licet de vitanda), which added the clause of the two- thirds majority. The three canonical methods of election per scrutinium (ballot), per compromissum (a small group of cardinals designated by the college elected the pope), per inspirationem (electors unanimously acclaimed a cardinal) were set out explicitly in the conciliar constitution promulgated by Gregory X on November 1, 1274. Thus, the Middle Ages bequeathed to the modern era an institutional mechanism which in its essential features (those having the right to vote, two-thirds majority, electoral procedures) would endure, though not without a few important changes, down to the present day (on this topic of the continuity/innovation of these rules over time see Agostino Paravicini Bagliani and Maria Antonietta Visceglia, Il Conclave. Continuità e mutamenti dal Medioevo ad oggi [Viella, 2018]). Chapter 2 deals with the figure of the cardinal as it evolved between 1417, the year the popes returned to Rome, and the end of the eighteenth century. This chapter adopts a highly statistical approach that takes into account variables such as cardinals' family extraction, geographical origins (increasingly Italian over the centuries), wealth, piety, and links with external secular powers (Italian princes and the great monarchies, especially France and Spain). Professor Pattenden considers cardinals not just an oligarchy but a political class—a group held together by affinities and relationships—and he uses these two categories to shed light on individual aspects of the cardinalate and how these were related to evolving electoral practices. For example, he asks whether the bureaucratization of the cardinalate "affected...

Varieties of Governance in China: Migration and Institutional Change in Chinese Villages. By Jie Lu. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 312p. $74.00. - Cities and Stability: Urbanization, Redistribution, and Regime Survival in China. By Jeremy L. Wallace. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 266p. $105.00 cloth, $31.95 paper.

Book Reviews