Institutionalist Scholars Research Articles

The case of Brexit: How to open a critical juncture without an exogenous shock?

The article examines Brexit through the historical institutionalist scholarship on European integration, critical junctures and institutional change. It finds that the concepts of path dependence, and critical junctures that emerge from exogenous shocks, as well as most processes of endogenous institutional transformation cannot fully account for Brexit. How can a Member State leave the European Union, if membership in the organisation produces path-dependent effects and there is no exogenous shock? To answer the question, the article introduces the concept of a hybrid critical juncture – a period of increased contingency and uncertainty that is created gradually by a combination of exogenous and endogenous causes and agency. The article examines the events that led to the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the EU to demonstrate how the hybrid critical juncture concept explains Brexit. The analysis contributes to understanding potential future European disintegration and incremental institutional transformation broadly defined.

What About Fertility? The Unintentional Pro-natalism of a Nordic Country

Abstract Combining high birth rates with gender equality and women’s reproductive choice is often put forward as a Nordic success story. We analyze Norwegian governmental commission reports delivered 1984–2017, tracing how fertility issues are approached in policy-making under shifting demographic conditions. We focus on four key topics—pro-natalism, individual versus societal level effects of policies, socioeconomic differences in fertility, and immigration. We see little or no attention given to the fact that policy effects may vary by class background or preferences. Relatively high fertility is considered positive, but pro-natalist intent is downplayed or absent, even when fertility is falling. We connect these findings to the distinctive Nordic dual earner/care-giver model, a historical legacy of “unintentional” pro-natalism, and features of the commission system. We call for more interchange between demography and institutionalist scholarship and argue that questions of macro-level fertility effects of family policies could be better handled in a more explicit debate.

Gendered Institutions and Where to Find Them: A Critical Realist Approach

AbstractThe gender and politics literature offers diverse views on the causes of gendered practices and the best methodologies for studying them. This article advances efforts to take stock of and systematize this diversity by grounding the feminist institutionalist perspective in critical realism. The article posits that gendered institutions are real entities with independent powers, while also emphasizing the crucial role that human ideas play in upholding and contesting gendered practices. To faithfully capture gendered institutions and their relationship with human agency, the article promotes the use of the abductive-retroductive research design. This approach allows feminist institutionalist scholars to construct and test multiple competing theories about gendered institutions, drawing from various empirical manifestations of institutional power. These expressions range from observable actions to codified rules, socially shared norms, and other subtle discourses. By shedding light on the principles at the heart of realist-oriented feminist research, this work paves the way for a more standardized and transparent approach to feminist inquiries.

Judicial self-perceptions and the separation of powers in varied political regime contexts: the constitutional courts in Hungary and Slovakia

ABSTRACT The study of constitutional courts (CCs) of post-communist Europe typically entailed the belief in CCs’ transformative potential for the consolidation of democracy. Recently, this belief has been questioned, albeit the knowledge of why at least some CCs in the region failed to prevent the rise of non-democratic regimes remains limited. This article addresses this gap via the cases of Hungary and Slovakia, which have taken a different trajectory post-2010: the Slovak CC (SCC) remains an independent institution, while the Hungarian CC (HCC) has been packed by the executive. By combining contextual case law analysis of judgments referring to democracy and semi-structured interviews, the article shows that, during critical moments, the HCC did not perceive itself as responsible for Hungarian democracy, which resulted in its self-marginalisation. The SCC was largely spared from similarly critical moments, which, however, facilitated particular self-perceptions of its responsibility (or lack thereof). These findings offer empirical support for institutionalist scholarship that emphasizes the impact of ideas in calibrating the self-perceptions of political institutions and their positioning in the political system. Constitutional courts remain inseparable from the political regimes they are located in.

Institutional Inertia and Change: Explaining the Czech and Portuguese Engagement in European Defence Market Integration

AbstractThe Permanent Structured Cooperation in Defence (PESCO) and the European Defence Fund (EDF) constitute another attempt to consolidate the European defence market. In this article, we explain the different engagements of Czechia and Portugal in the two initiatives until 2021 through the evolution and reform of the domestic institutions governing their defence industrial policies. We trace how the institutions were established, how they contributed to the national position on PESCO and EDF and how the two countries' defence industries became involved. The article shows how the different institutionalisation of the defence sector allowed Portugal and its companies to participate more than their Czech counterparts. We contribute to historical institutionalist scholarship by evidencing the critical role of ideas in promoting and preventing policy change. We also offer an insight into the practice of European defence co‐operation and identify processes that challenge further integration.

Degrowth and the Global South? How Institutionalism can Complement a Timely Discourse on Ecologically Sustainable Development in an Unequal World

The goal of this article is twofold: first, it assesses the current state of collaboration between institutionalist economics and the academic degrowth discourse on the topic of global inequalities. Since a systematic literature review of the current degrowth discourse shows that the level of such collaboration is limited, the second goal of the article is to outline avenues through which institutionalist scholars could contribute to the current academic degrowth discourse. These include the provision of theories of institutional change, a methodological reflection of selected formal models, and substantive insights on the co-evolution of institutions and technological change.

Chester Barnard’s Theory of the Firm: An Institutionalist View

Chester Barnard’s work can be shown to contain subversive elements which accord with the spirit of institutionalist scholarship. Barnard saw corporations as systems of power whose sustainability must be backed by moral resources which are becoming increasingly scarce today. This vision suggests that the core role of corporations may be found to be in mobilizing power and morality needed to maintain social cooperation. Even though Barnard failed to develop an adequate critique of corporate power and business enterprise, he advanced a set of innovative concepts which illuminate the contribution of corporations toward the coordination of the social provisioning process.

Equity, justice and the SDGs: lessons learnt from two decades of INEA scholarship

Environmental justice issues have been incrementally but consistently covered within this journal in the last two decades. This article reviews theoretical and empirical approaches to justice in INEA scholarship in order to identify trends and draw lessons for the interpretation and implementation of the 2030 Agenda and for living within environmental limits. Our review traces how justice considerations were initially covered within new institutionalist scholarship on collective action and social practices, to conceptualizing justice as ‘access and allocation’, to newer notions of planetary justice. We link these trends to scholarship on diverse epistemologies and typologies of justice, including conservative, corrective, distributive and procedural justice, and examine their operationalization within the empirical domains of climate, water and sustainable development. In concluding, we draw out implications for the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda. We argue that a just approach is essential to living within environmental limits, with greater synergies needed between collective action and social practice approaches. While justice can be unpacked for practical and political reasons into access and allocation, we find that (procedural) access considerations are more politically palatable in practice than a concern with allocation (distributive justice), which remains much more contested. As such, dominant approaches promote ‘conservative’ or thin market-based notions of justice. We conclude by noting that just allocation is a precondition to just access. A failure to prioritize and achieve more corrective and distributive forms of justice will, without doubt, contribute to exacerbating global ecological degradation.

Norm-busting: rightist challenges in US and Australian immigration and refugee policies

Institutionalist scholars argue that international rights norms, judicial autonomy and discourses of immigrant nationhood constrain shifts to harsher immigration policies in liberal democracies, particularly settler societies. The Trump presidency and the Liberal–National Coalition government in Australia during the same period are occasions to test whether those norms functioned as expected in two paradigmatic country cases. Both governments attempted to undermine judicial autonomy, the illegitimacy of ethnic and religious selection of immigrants, the rights of detained children and families, and the principle of non-refoulement. A new institutionalist analysis of attempted norm-busting in each country specifies which norms were effective constraints. International legal and political constraints were weak. Domestically, norms obliging the protection of children were more effective than norms related to adults. Discourses favouring immigrant nationhood and opposing discrimination resonated, but were confronted by equally powerful discourses of insular nationalism and security that promoted restriction. While the judiciary moderately constrained new policies, particularly in the US, in neither country did the judiciary fully act in line with dominant theoretical expectations, because of both structural and normative weaknesses.

Disaster governance and institutional dynamics in times of social-ecological change: Insights from New Zealand, the Netherlands and Greece

In this paper, we engage with the ‘good disaster governance’ imperative and we attempt to empirically capture the (socio-)institutional dimensions and dynamics producing, reproducing or responding to social-ecological change and disasters. Viewing the disaster situation as a project of collective endeavour, we propose a conceptual framing of institutions building on disaster and development studies, governance of social-ecological systems, adaptive institutions research, and sociological institutionalist scholarship. We apply our analytical framework to Christchurch (New Zealand), Groningen (The Netherlands) and the island of Rhodes (Greece) through a relational comparative approach that builds on previous analyses and in-depth interviews with stakeholders. The three case-studies face diverse types of disasters that we conceptually approach around moments of ‘abrupt change’. For Christchurch, the abrupt change refers to the earthquake of February 2011. For Groningen, it is a ‘big’ earthquake with a magnitude of 3.6 in 2012, and for Rhodes the intense water shortages or ‘water crisis’ in July 2017. The results reveal commonalities among the case studies around the crucial role institutions play in creating or exacerbating disasters; technical and structural challenges hindering institutions' adaptiveness; and institutional logics with lock-in effects leading to maladaptation. Our framing and discussion elucidate under-examined and under-theorized aspects of the ‘adaptive governance’ and ‘adaptive institutions’ concepts, and provides the basis for a socio-ecologically and socio-institutionally nuanced analytical approach to the pragmatics of disaster governance.

Between conflict and consensus: The Dutch depoliticized paradigm shift of the 1980s

How do deep economic crises reshuffle dominant policy frameworks? Institutionalist scholars such as Peter Hall, Mark Blyth, Vivien Schmidt and Colin Hay have focused particularly on the 1980s. The polarizing ascension of Thatcher and Reagan, characterized by a public battle of ideas, has become the prime example of a broader neoliberal turn. Based on this experience, it is common to assume that a shift in policy paradigm involves a politicized contest over ideas. The Dutch market-oriented reforms of the 1980s have long been described as a counterexample, representing an alternative, consensual trajectory of institutional change. As critics have pointed out, the problem with this account is that there is little evidence for an economic policy consensus in the 1980s. Based on the Dutch case, this paper proposes a third, depoliticized model of institutional change, where policy makers instigate a battle of ideas within the institutions, while politicians depoliticize the reforms in public debate.

Institutional reform and public attitudes toward EU decision making

AbstractIn the face of the discourse about the democratic deficit and declining public support for the European Union (EU), institutionalist scholars have examined the roles of institutions in EU decision making and in particular the implications of the empowered European Parliament. Almost in isolation from this literature, prior research on public attitudes toward the EU has largely adopted utilitarian, identity and informational accounts that focus on individual‐level attributes. By combining the insights from the institutional and behavioural literature, this article reports on a novel cross‐national conjoint experiment designed to investigate multidimensionality of public attitudes by taking into account the specific roles of institutions and distinct stages in EU decision making. Analysing data from a large‐scale experimental survey in 13 EU member states, the findings demonstrate how and to what extent the institutional design of EU decision making shapes public support. In particular, the study finds a general pattern of public consensus about preferred institutional reform regarding powers of proposal, adoption and voting among European citizens in different countries, but notable dissent about sanctioning powers. The results show that utilitarian and partisan considerations matter primarily for the sanctioning dimension in which many respondents in Austria, the Czech Republic, Denmark and Sweden prefer national courts to the Court of Justice of the EU.

Pockets of Weakness in Strong Institutions: Post-Marketing Regulation, Psychopharmaceutical Drugs, and Medical Autonomy, 1938–1982

A central question in the study of health politics and policy is the degree to which the state can shape American medicine. This long-standing debate began amid early battles over health insurance and continues through the contemporary opioid epidemic. Unlike recent and post–Affordable Care Act claims emphasizing the federal government's strong ability to intervene in healthcare marketplaces, this article supports claims of medicine's autonomy from political intervention, drawing on an extensive analysis of recurrent, halting, and largely unsuccessful efforts to regulate popular psychopharmaceutical drugs from the 1940s through the 1980s. I first develop an account of a “pocket of weakness,” the post-marketing pharmaceutical regulatory process, in an otherwise strong institution, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). I then demonstrate how this regulatory structure, interacting with policymakers’ incentives, caused constrained responses, inaction, and drift. Amid concerns about misuse, overuse, abuse, side effects, and addiction, regulators and legislators found it difficult to restrict access to or disincentivize the prescription and consumption of problematic therapeutics, in spite of their varied and repeated regulatory efforts. This elaboration of a pocket of weakness has important theoretical implications for historical institutionalist scholarship that principally focuses on state strength. This account also has substantive implications for scholarship on health politics and policy, mental health treatment, and the political causes of medicalization, and can help explain the opioid epidemic's emergence, potential trajectory, and circumscribed solution set.

A bird in the hand: Temporal focal points and change in international institutions

This article develops a theoretical explanation for the timing of change in international institutions. It provides a rational choice response to key insights of historical institutionalist scholarship. Many existing theories—such as rational choice and sociological institutionalisms—explain the timing of change mainly by listing its causes. An analysis of the timing of change in many realms of institutional activity, however, demonstrates that incentives to alter institutions frequently accumulate, unaddressed for extended periods of time. The result is persistent institutional suboptimality, punctuated intermittently by phases of transformation. To account for divergence from the expectations of existing theories, I test two hypotheses concerning the role of transaction costs and temporal coordination dilemmas in hindering change. Introducing the concept of Temporal Focal Points, the article explains why temporal landmarks, such as international crises and prominent anniversaries, are frequently associated with non-linear, transformative change. To assess the explanatory potential of this framework, I analyze the record of change in United Nations environmental institutions. The case study supports the hypotheses advanced, leading to the conclusion that the when of institutional change can tell us a lot about the why of change.

The EU’s preferential trade agreements with Singapore and Vietnam. Market vs. normative imperatives

ABSTRACTBy negotiating Free Trade Agreements the EU aspires both to increase the competitiveness of its industry and contribute to sustainable development in the partner country. It pursues a flexible approach to norm promotion which aims at supporting developing countries in their attempt to adjust to international standards. Ideational and institutionalist scholars interpreted this approach as a manifestation of its normative power. We show that in the negotiations with Singapore and Vietnam the positions of the EU were not consistent with its declared goals, since they put stronger pressures upon Vietnam to adjust to regulatory standards. We explain this lack of consistency as the result of different patterns of interest group mobilization in the two negotiations. Those patterns, in turn, depend upon the bargaining power the EU has with single trade partners, competition between the EU and third countries, especially the US, and the structure of the economy of the trade partners.

A Capital Controversy in Early Twentieth Century: Veblen vs. Clark

:This article aims to assess the debate between John Bates Clark and the “old” institutionalist scholars — Thorstein Veblen, above all — with particular reference to the nature of capital and the functioning of the labor market. Although studies on both authors are numerous, relatively little attention has been paid to finding the crucial elements at the heart of their radical disagreement. A.J. Cohen (2014) convincingly argues that Veblen’s attack on Clark is in the center of the capital controversy of the 1960s and 1970s. We propose an extension of this argument, based on the idea that Veblen’s attack on Clark follows three steps. First, Veblen defined capital in money terms and, at the same time, he saw it as the accumulated technological and institutional experience of a community. Second, insofar as capital cannot be reduced to a stock of physical goods, it is logically impossible to derive a function of the marginal labor productivity from the existing stock of capital. Third, insofar as the marginal productivity of labor cannot be measured, it follows that the equality between real wage and marginal labor productivity cannot logically hold. It also follows that, since it does not exist, this equality cannot be used as a basis for establishing that the equilibrium wage is a just wage.

Autocratic legacies and state management of Islamic activism in Niger

In contrast to similar organizations in its neighbouring countries, Niger's domestic Salafi associations have remained peaceful and apolitical. Drawing on historical institutionalist scholarship and on recent conceptualizations of the state as a religious actor, this article examines how the Nigerien state has tried to regulate religious practices since Seyni Kountché's military coup in 1974. It argues that the institutional regulation of religious practices is one important variable that accounts for Niger's deviant trajectory. During Niger's autocratic period (1974–91), the government established the Association islamique du Niger (AIN) as the sole legal authority regulating access to Niger's Friday prayer mosques. Committed to peaceful and apolitical interpretations of the Koran, the AIN confined access to Niger's religious sphere to local clerics and Sufi brotherhoods. After the breakdown of autocratic rule in 1991, the AIN served as a religious advisory body. Salafi associations could assemble freely but had to abide by certain criteria. Confronted with the prospect of Islamic violence in 2000, the Nigerien state intervened in Niger's religious sphere in several ways. Among other initiatives, the government began to resurrect a more rigorous system of religious supervision in order to monitor religious practices on an ongoing basis.

“Law, Good Faith, Order, Security”: Joseph Conrad's Institutions

This essay examines the relationship between character and institution in Conrad's Nostromo. It argues that Nostromo undoes the Victorian impulse to reconcile the individual and the social world in the conventions of the bildungsroman and the adoption and modification of those conventions in Conrad's earlier novels (such as Lord Jim) by constructing a narrative in which development has been relocated from the interesting individual to what the novel calls “material interests” and what Conrad elsewhere terms “political institutions.” Nostromo's flattened characters, proliferation of types, and elastic temporality serve to organize its narrative around the “inhuman” timescape of institutions—of the state, military, communication, transit, and finance—rather than the individual biography. Relying on a romance plot to bring closure to a theoretically endless narrative of institutional reproduction, Nostromo calls on tropes of nineteenth-century realism only to insist upon their inadequacy. The novel's attention to institutions as material structures (and as actors in their own right) joined to sets of values, practices, and incentives (and thus as contexts for individual action) resonates with recent institutionalist scholarship from the social sciences and makes Nostromo a significant text in the history of the modern novel's engagement with collectivity.

The Discursive Side of New Institutionalism

This article introduces various strands of neoinstitutionalism, with the focus on sociological institutionalism, particularly ‘Stanford School’ sociological institutionalism and discursive institutionalism. The article points out that in opposing individualist rational choice theory, sociological institutionalism takes a strong structuralist stance in which actors are depicted as agents constituted by the scripts of rationalist world culture, mindlessly enacting worldwide models. In contrast, discursive institutionalist scholarship focuses on research about the actual practices through which global ideas are incorporated in local contexts, as well as on the discourses that motivate actors in the modern world to behave so uniformly in several ways, even though the culture of modernity specifically celebrates individualism and sovereignty and denounces mindless compliance. These studies have highlighted the key role of local actors in the local-global interaction. Yet these orientations must not be seen as separate schools of thought, but rather as developments within neoinstitutionalist sociology. In other words, recent years have witnessed an increased interest in the forms of local-global interaction. Case analyses have shown that synchronization of national policies seems to be a side effect of local actors utilizing broadly shared ideas and values in justifying their political objectives.

Ethnographic Research in Gendered Organizations: The Case of the Westminster Parliament

Anthropologists and new institutionalist scholars studying politics share an interest in rules, norms, and power. The former tend to agree more closely with those researchers who rely on inductive empiricism rather than deductive research methods, take an historical perspective, and treat ambiguities as part of the study rather than an inconvenience. As Olivier de Sardan argues, those institutionalist approaches that tend to rely on abstract, predetermined structures contrast with the way anthropologists see social norms as emerging out of interaction between people in specific contexts (2014, 288).