Many institutionalist scholars—historical institutionalists in particular—have recognized for some time that our understanding of institutional change needs to be improved. Taking this premise as a starting point, this article develops it by arguing that we not only need to understand institutional change better but that we also need to improve our understanding of how it is gendered. The chapter combines key elements from institutional analysis with recent gender and politics scholarship. This combination will form an analytical framework that can be used to examine how different instances of institutional change are gendered, highlighting, for example, the importance of some key concepts such as informal institutions and their role in either promoting or stymieing attempts to promote institutional change. After exploring the gaps in many current gender and politics analyses such as their capacity to explain many instances of institutional change, the paper charts the development of key insights on institutional change from both historical institutionalism and feminist institutionalism. It delineates different forms of institutional change and develops some key themes for each one that might enable us to better understand, not only how each is gendered, but also how far each form might be used by change actors as a gender equity strategy.
Article
Jan Olsson
Institutions have always been of great concern to public administration, in both a practical and an analytical sense. The new institutionalism, developing in different versions from the early 1980s, has contributed new and varied insights on how institutional factors shape the life of public administrations. Instead of mainly focusing on formal rules and organizations, as in traditional (“old”) institutionalism, new institutionalism perceives of institutions in a broader sense, as patterned behavior also following from informal rules, norms, and habits. Different institutional perspectives continue to develop with some mutual borrowing of ideas, but they also specialize, which help us understand how public administrations are shaped by the historical legacies of institutions, institutional rules and norms that socialize organization members; institutions as incentive structures designed to increase trust and compliance; organizational adaption to major institutional trends, and institutions as cultures of communication. These perspectives are specific lenses that bring valuable, complementary insights, particularly when it comes to their varied conceptualizations of agency: strategic calculation, social adaption and imitation as well as social construction in communicative settings. However, it is argued that institutionalism has largely neglected political aspects in the interaction between institution and agency, which needs to be explored and elaborated on in future empirical research and theoretical development. The political character of public administrations is very complex and varies from individual preference falsification in order to adapt to institutions, to subversive actions for trying to undermine or to secure existing institutions when important values are at stake in public administrations.
Article
Kidane Mengisteab
Most African countries are characterized by parallel institutions, one representing the formal laws of the state and the other representing the traditional institutions that are adhered to more commonly in rural areas. The parallel institutional systems often complement each other in the continent’s contemporary governance. Oftentimes, however, they contradict each other, creating problems associated with institutional incoherence. Why the traditional systems endure, how the institutional dichotomy impacts the process of building democratic governance, and how the problems of institutional incoherence might be mitigated are issues that have not yet received adequate attention in African studies. The evidence suggests that traditional institutions have continued to metamorphose under the postcolonial state, as Africa’s socioeconomic systems continue to evolve. Despite such changes, these institutions are referred to as traditional not because they continue to exist in an unadulterated form as they did in Africa’s precolonial past but because they are largely born of the precolonial political systems and are adhered to principally, although not exclusively, by the population in the traditional (subsistent) sectors of the economy. Subsequent to the colonial experience, traditional institutions may be considered to be informal institutions in the sense that they are often not sanctioned by the state. However, they are not merely customs and norms; rather they are systems of governance, which were formal in precolonial times and continue to exist in a semiformal manner in some countries and in an informal manner in others. Another issue that needs some clarification is the neglect by the literature of the traditional institutions of the political systems without centralized authority structures. In general, decentralized political systems, which are often elder-based with group leadership, have received little attention, even though these systems are widespread and have the institutions of judicial systems and mechanisms of conflict resolution and allocation of resources, like the institutions of the centralized systems. Careful analysis suggests that African traditional institutions lie in a continuum between the highly decentralized to the centralized systems and they all have resource allocation practices, conflict resolution, judicial systems, and decision-making practices, which are distinct from those of the state.
Article
Jan Olsson and Erik Hysing
The theoretical concept of inside activism brings fresh light on institutional change by upgrading the importance of political agency within public organizations. Inside activism captures a specific empirical phenomenon, namely, public officials being committed to the agendas of civil society networks and organizations, and acting from inside public organizations to induce policy and institutional change. Inside activism upgrades political aspects of public organizations, recognizing the importance of authority, power, and combative action. Public organizations are institutionally shaped by continuous processes of consolidation and fragmentation. This means opportunities for inside activists to act politically, preferably in secret and subversive ways, and to further strengthen the fragmented nature of public organizations. Strategically, inside activists can work for institutional change by expanding their agency through the development of collective power and networking, using combative subversive strategy, working for cumulative effects and combinative solutions as well as to bend and break constraints on their actions (the 5C model). To induce change, they further exploit institutional ambiguities like “weak spots” of institutions and discrepancies between institutional rules and practices on the ground. The neglect of inside activism within institutional theory likely means that the possibility of institutional change has been underestimated and there is thus a need for a comprehensive research agenda on inside activism, political agency, and institutional change, which in this article is termed “new political institutionalism.”
Article
Minou De Ruiter and Sanneke Kuipers
Policy crises often lead to “framing contests,” in which officeholders, opponents, media, and the public at large aim to interpret the crisis in question, explain its cause, attribute responsibility, and agree on ways to address harm caused. More often than not, these contests turn into blame games for the incumbent officeholder. Formal and informal institutional factors can shape blame avoidance options of officeholders, and influence the outcomes of these crisis-induced blame games in terms of blame escalation, policy responses, and political sanctions.
First, formal institutions shape officeholders’ incentives for arguing that they are not responsible for the crisis or should not be punished for its occurrence. Studies in the field of welfare state retrenchment and ministerial resignations have analyzed the blame avoidance options of governments and the survival rates of officeholders in various institutional settings. These studies have provided evidence that institutional complexity and policy-making authority help explaining pathways of blame management. In single-party governments, the accountability chain is more clear and prime ministers have a stronger electoral incentive to sack failing and unpopular ministers. However, a more restrictive interpretation of formal ministerial responsibility for administrative or implementation failures, along with the delegation of policy execution to agencies at arm’s length, can work as a protective shield in blame games for the officeholders and reinforce policy inertia. Consociational systems with multiparty coalitions often show an opposite effect.
Second, institutionalized norms, also known as “the way we do things around here,” affect blame avoidance behavior available to officeholders. Studies which have taken “cultural-institutional” approaches to accountability studies have shown that informal accountability actors, fora, and norms about appropriate behavior shape blame processes. Actors in consociational systems with multiparty coalitions often consider consensus-oriented and nonconfrontational behavior, such as attempts to appease the opposition with policy reparations, as more appropriate responses to blame than those in systems with more elite polarization. In addition, officeholders are increasingly held to account by actors who solely have an informal role in blame games, such as the media and interest groups. Therefore, the extent of mediatization and increased polarization plays a major role in how different political contexts “process” blame.
Third, other relevant noninstitutional factors for blame avoidance behavior are important, such as the nature and timing of the crisis and involvement of other actors in the blame game. Issue salience and proximity affect the potential for blame escalations and the options for blame management by both office holders and their opponents. Prior reputation of incumbent politicians helps them to draw on leadership capital to deflect blame. If the timing of a blame game coincides with upcoming elections, blame is more likely to escalate and lead to political sanctions.
To further understanding of the role of institutional factors in crisis-induced blames games, future research should focus on blame games where institutions themselves are questioned, contested, or in-flux.
Article
Mark Hallerberg
The topic of fiscal politics includes taxation and spending, budget balances and debt levels, and crises and the politics of austerity. The discussion often focuses on how some variable—such as the international environment, or political institutions—constrains “politics” in this realm. Almost omnipresent concerns about endogeneity run through this research. While this is a “big” policy area that deserves study, tracing causation is difficult.
Article
Alastair Stark
Institutional amnesia can be defined in simple terms as an organization’s inability to recall and use historical knowledge for present-day purposes. However, the concept requires to be defined more expansively so that its causes and effects can be fully understood in relation to crises and crisis management. This means conceptualizing institutional amnesia in broader terms as something that influences individual crisis managers, the formal institutional aspects of crisis management agencies, the cultural dimensions of those agencies, and the wider systemic location within which both actors and agencies reside. The analysis of the effects of amnesia in each of these areas reveals the profound effects that it can have on various aspects of crisis management.
Institutional amnesia can affect the performance of crisis management policies and the politics of crises more generally. In particular, memory loss can be seen to influence crisis decision-making that relies upon historical analogy, crisis learning which demands that learned lessons are formally institutionalized across time, and meaning-making efforts, which draw upon recollections of the past to justify political projects in the present. The effects that institutional amnesia has on these three important areas illuminate its relevance to crisis analysis. Yet amnesia, and to some extent memory, continue to be concepts that are neglected, or referred to tangentially, by mainstream crisis scholars.
Article
Christopher Wlezien and Stuart N. Soroka
The link between public opinion and public policy is of special importance in representative democracies, as we expect elected officials to care about what voters think. Not surprisingly, a large body of literature tests whether policy is a function of public preferences. Some literature also considers the mechanisms by which preferences are converted to policy. Yet other work explores whether and how the magnitude of opinion representation varies systematically across issues and political institutions. In all this research, public opinion is an independent variable—an important driver of public policy change—but it is also a dependent variable, one that is a consequence of policy itself. Indeed, the ongoing existence of both policy representation and public responsiveness is critical to the functioning of representative democracy.
Article
Ana Petrova
Partisan organizations are the set of structured patterns of interaction among political cadres and members alike that are prescribed either by formal rules of procedure or by traditions and unwritten rules. Scholars of Latin America have generally described local partisan organizations as weak but have also devoted significant attention to the study of informal party structures, whose robustness and complexity have tended to contrast with the general fragility of their formal counterparts. Although important data-related challenges have precluded more systematic and generalizable analyses of the causes and consequences of party organizations, meticulous theoretical works and case studies have explored the questions of what organizations look like, how they operate, how they were built, and what outcomes they result in. This literature has identified ideational and tangible resources as the primary predictors of organizational strength. Strong and easily identifiable party brands provide both politicians and partisans with incentives to join and remain in a political party even in times of bad electoral performance and limited selective benefits. Material resources are shaped by countries’ institutional frameworks and structure politicians’ priorities in terms of their career ambitions and their relationships to voters and partisans. In turn, robust organizations have been associated with longer party survival and a narrower margin of action of the party leaderships. The presence of an extended network of party members and sympathizers make parties more resilient to short-term challenges, which is no small feat in a region marked by relatively high electoral volatility and many institutions of fleeting existence. The recent release of several important data sets and the proliferation of knowledge of how parties work create exciting avenues for future research.
Article
Sonia Palmieri
While women have succeeded in promoting a feminist agenda in some parliaments, the international research shows that this is not always possible, and accordingly, not a realistic expectation for women. Parliaments, like any institution, have specific cultural norms and practices, some of which actively work against the advancement of gender equality. Understanding the conditions under which female—and male—parliamentarians might succeed in promoting gender equality outcomes has become an important avenue for research and development practice. The focus on gender-sensitive parliaments allows for a framework to identify, and encourage the development of, those conditions.
There are four key elements of a gender-sensitive parliament. First, it accepts that the responsibility to achieve gender equality, both as a policy outcome and as a process, rests with the parliament as a whole (its male and female members and staff) and with the organizations that drive substantial policy, procedural, and normative development (political parties). Second, a gender-sensitive parliament is guided by institutional policies and legal frameworks, which allow the parliament to monitor its achievements toward gender equality and allow follow-up and review. Third, a gender-sensitive parliament institutionalizes a gender mainstreaming approach through its representational, legislative, and oversight work to ensure that all the parliament’s outputs consider, and counteract, any potential discrimination against women or men, girls or boys. This element requires a reconsideration of the process and structures of the parliament, including the respective roles and capacities of members and parliamentary staff. Fourth, a gender-sensitive parliament constantly strives to eliminate institutional cultures that sanction and perpetuate discriminatory, prejudicial norms and attitudes in the workplace against women members and staff.
Article
Matthijs Bogaards
Ever since Aristotle, the comparative study of political regimes and their performance has relied on classifications and typologies. The study of democracy today has been influenced heavily by Arend Lijphart’s typology of consensus versus majoritarian democracy. Scholars have applied it to more than 100 countries and sought to demonstrate its impact on no less than 70 dependent variables. This paper summarizes our knowledge about the origins, functioning, and consequences of two basic types of democracy: those that concentrate power and those that share and divide power. In doing so, it will review the experience of established democracies and question the applicability of received wisdom to new democracies.
Article
Stefaan Walgrave and Peter Van Aelst
Recently, the number of studies examining whether media coverage has an effect on the political agenda has been growing strongly. Most studies found that preceding media coverage does exert an effect on the subsequent attention for issues by political actors. These effects are contingent, though, they depend on the type of issue and the type of political actor one is dealing with. Most extant work has drawn on aggregate time-series designs, and the field is as good as fully non-comparative.
To further develop our knowledge about how and why the mass media exert influence on the political agenda, three ways forward are suggested. First, we need better theory about why political actors would adopt media issues and start devoting attention to them. The core of such a theory should be the notion of the applicability of information encapsulated in the media coverage to the goals and the task at hand of the political actors. Media information has a number of features that make it very attractive for political actors to use—it is often negative, for instance. Second, we plead for a disaggregation of the level of analysis from the institutional level (e.g., parliament) or the collective actor level (e.g., party) to the individual level (e.g., members of parliament). Since individuals process media information, and since the goals and tasks of individuals that trigger the applicability mechanism are diverse, the best way to move forward is to tackle the agenda setting puzzle at the individual level. This implies surveying individual elites or, even better, implementing experimental designs to individual elite actors. Third, the field is in dire need of comparative work comparing how political actors respond to media coverage across countries or political systems.
Article
Cristina Bodea
The recent global economic crisis has renewed interest in the nature and history of monetary policy, the distributional effects of central bank policy, central bank governance, and the personalities at the helm of major central banks. In modern times, a country’s central bank formulates, or, to a minimum, implements, a country’s monetary policy, or the process of adjustment of a country’s money supply to achieve some combination of stable prices and sustainable economic growth. Monetary policy depends heavily on a country’s exchange rate system. Under fixed exchange rates, the country’s commitment to keep the level of the currency at a certain level dictates monetary policy to a great degree. As the gold standard was unraveling after World War I, many countries experienced high inflation or even hyperinflation. A similar situation faced monetary policy after the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates in the 1970s. By the 1980s, however, countries turned toward central bank independence as an institutional arrangement to control inflation. The current issues surrounding monetary policy have emerged from the historical increase in central bank independence and the 2007 economic and financial crisis. In particular, the opacity of central bank decisions, given their autonomy to pursue stable prices without political interference, has increased the demand for transparency and communication with the government, the public, and financial markets. Also, the 2007 crisis pushed central banks toward unconventional measures and macro-prudential regulation, and brought back into focus the monetary policy of the euro area.
Article
Helena Stensöta Olofsdotter and Lena Wängnerud
It is widely recognized that corruption, or the act of using public power for private ends, is a major destructive force for humans and human societies. Research has shown that corruption is one of the most detrimental factors currently afflicting the economies of developing countries. It further undercuts various dimensions of human well-being such as health, access to clean water, and education, and it negatively affects subjective dimensions of life such as self-reported well-being and happiness.
It was against the backdrop of corruption as a major destructive force that researchers at the World Bank in the late 1990s started to explore new directions in research such as the relevance of the gender perspective. In their groundbreaking study, “Are Women Really the Fairer Sex? Corruption and Women in Government,” Dollar and colleagues demonstrated that higher rates of female participation in government are associated with lower national levels of corruption. They measured corruption using data from the International Country Risk Guide, and they included a broad range of variables in their analysis to control for various underlying institutional characteristics that could be responsible for a spurious correlation. In a follow-up study, Swamy, in 2001, presented a more comprehensive empirical analysis, but most importantly, also a more elaborated theoretical framework. Swamy and colleagues suggested that women may follow laws to a greater extent than men because they feel protected by them. Further, girls may be brought up to have higher levels of self-control than boys, which may prevent them from engaging in criminal acts. For women in power, the most important argument for why an increased number in government would affect corruption was that women might lower corruption levels not only by being less involved in corrupt behavior themselves but also by initiating policies to fight corruption or to recruit staff who are less corrupt.
The initial studies spurred a heated debate on the direction of causality—what effects what—and after more than a decade of research on gender and corruption, it is clear that the link between the two factors is complex: For example, the relationship between levels of women in government and levels of corruption appears in democracies but not in authoritarian states. Moreover, the expected pattern that a high share of women is related to low levels of corruption appears in analysis focusing on the proportion of women in elected assemblies, such as national parliaments, but not in analysis focusing on the proportion of women in the bureaucracy—that is in positions related to the implementation of policies. There is also considerable subnational variation both in levels of corruption and in the share of women in elected assemblies. Studies elaborating on the gender perspective also show the need for reconsidering the definitions of corruption; women are particularly vulnerable in transactions including sexual “services.”
Article
Felix Berenskoetter and Yuri van Hoef
International friendship affects the making and conduct of foreign policy, an angle that is largely neglected in the International Relations (IR) literature. Friendship constitutes the Other as familiar rather than foreign and implies a significant degree of trust, and analysts need to pay careful attention to the various ways close bonds develop and “work” across state boundaries. They need to understand how seeking friends can be an explicit goal of foreign policy and how established friendships function by studying their discursive, emotional, and practical expressions and their impact on decision making in concrete situations and as a disposition for cooperation in the long term. Yet, tracing these bonds and associated practices, especially the informal ones, is an analytical challenge. This article presents international friendship as a particular relationship of mutually agreed role identities embedded in a strong cognitive, normative, and emotional bond revolving around a shared idea of order. It discusses three types of practices unique to this relationship: providing privileged/special access, solidarity and support in times of need, and resolve and negative Othering against third parties. These friendship bonds and associated practices can be observed across three levels: political leaders, government bureaucracies, and civil society.
Article
Erica Owen and Rena Sung
Research on the domestic politics of trade typically begins with a theory about who benefits from trade and who is harmed by it. The actors—for instance, firms, workers, or industries—who benefit from trade are expected to support liberalization while those who are harmed are expected to oppose liberalization. For individuals, exposure to globalization through the labor market—including the type of job, firm, or industry—is likely to be an important determinant of individuals’ preferences over policies governing the global economy. To understand the domestic politics of trade with respect to labor, therefore, it is important to ask two key questions.
First, what explains the preferences of workers? Broadly, scholars can be divided between those that argue different economic factors (i.e., labor market consequences) explain attitudes toward free trade and those who argue that noneconomic factors (e.g., values, information) are the main drivers of attitudes. Empirical tests of these theories rely on survey data. Second, how do trade pressures influence elections and when do workers’ interests influence policy outcomes? Research on mass politics shows that workers’ interests with respect to trade shape not only support for incumbents in elections but also whether elected officials support free trade. Domestic institutions also play an important role in this process, with research suggesting that democracies and left-leaning governments implement trade policies that are more favorable to workers.
Yet trade in the 21st century looks very different from trade 30 years ago. It no longer involves only (or even primarily) the exchange of final goods but also trade in intermediate goods and services. Trade is also closely linked to the production strategies of multinational firms, including offshoring. These fundamental changes in the nature of global economic activity have important implications for the how the interests of workers relate to those of their employers, and by extension the politics of trade. As a result, scholars are increasingly incorporating new models of trade into analysis of politics at the individual and aggregate levels.
Article
Amanda Lea Robinson
European colonialism in Africa was brief, lasting less than a century for most of the continent. Nevertheless, scholars have enumerated myriad long-term political effects of this brief period of colonial rule. First, Europeans determined the number, size, and shape of African states through their partition of the continent, with contemporary implications for state viability, strength, and legitimacy. Second, colonial rule influenced the nature of ethnic boundaries and their salience for politics through the use of indirect rule, language and labor policies, and the location of internal administrative boundaries. Third, colonial rule significantly shaped the nature of postcolonial state-society relations by divorcing the state from civil society during the colonial era and by engendering deep mistrust of the state as a benevolent actor. Fourth, many colonial institutions were preserved at independence, including the marriage of state institutions and customary rule, with deleterious effects. Fifth, differential colonial investments across communities and regions generated significant inequality, with continued political implications in the 21st century. The identification of these long-term effects has largely resulted from empirical comparisons across different forms of colonial rule, especially comparing territories administered by different colonial powers. Future research should move beyond this blunt approach, instead pursuing more disaggregated and nuanced measures of both colonial rule and its political legacies, as well as more scholarship on the long-term interaction between colonial and indigenous political institutions.
Article
Ken Opalo
What explains contemporary variation in legislative strength and institutionalization in Africa? Contrary to the widespread belief that African legislatures are uniformly weak, there is significant variation in both the institutional forms and powers of these institutions. Colonial institutional development and the nature of postcolonial single-party autocratic rule partially explain the variation in legislative strength and institutionalization in Africa. Legislative development (or lack thereof) under colonialism bequeathed postcolonial states with both institutional memory and intra-elite conceptions of executive–legislative relations (how legislatures work). The nature of postcolonial autocratic rule determined the upper bounds of legislative development. Relatively secure presidents tolerated legislative organizational development. Their weaker counterparts did not. These differences became apparent following the end of single-party rule in much of Africa the early 1990s. Legislatures in the former group exploited their newfound freedom to rebalance executive–legislative relations. Those in the latter group remained weak and subservient to presidents. In short, strong autocratic legislatures begat strong democratic legislatures.
Article
Wouter Vandenabeele and Carina Schott
Public service motivation (PSM) refers to an individual’s motivation to contribute to society. It relates to ideas about society, and about what public servants are and how they should behave, that have persisted for more than 2,500 years. Despite this heritage, PSM was only formally conceptualized in the 1990s. The concept of PSM has traditionally been linked to several beneficial outcomes, such as public performance and public servants’ satisfaction, but recently also to negative outcomes, such as burnout and rule-breaking.
While PSM is an individual-level concept, the role of the social environment is crucial to understanding PSM. On the one hand, social institutions play an important role in creating individual-level PSM through socializing mechanisms. Institutions such as the family and workplace, and other structured value-based interaction patterns, correlate with the prevalence of individual PSM. On the other hand, to render outcomes, interaction with the environment—in terms of fit—is necessary, because PSM cannot exert influence outside a context where public values are prominent. As most research focuses on public servants in their work environment, this fit mostly entails a match of the individual public servant with the organization or the job. If this fit is lacking, little or no PSM occurs.
Although PSM research was initially a theoretical and psychometric exercise, it is increasingly put to practical use.
Article
Wolfgang Wagner
Parliaments differ enormously in their foreign policy competences. This is best documented in the area of “war powers,” understood as decision-making on the use of force. In other issue areas, such as treaty-making, defense budgets, sanctions, or arms exports, differences across countries are far less researched. The available data, however, suggest that differences in those areas are no smaller than in the area of war powers. What is more, the data also show that parliamentary competences across issue areas within particular countries also differ a lot. Parliaments are not strong or weak across the full spectrum of foreign policy competences. Instead, parliamentary competences are country-specific as well as issue-specific. A general trend toward a parliamentarization or deparliamentarization of foreign affairs is not discernible.
Partly inspired by institutionalist versions of Democratic Peace Theory, numerous studies have examined whether parliamentary powers have any effect on countries’ propensity to use armed force. Case-study research tends to find that variation in parliamentary powers affects decision-making on the use of force but also emphasizes that the effects of institutional constraints need to be understood in conjunction with the preferences of the public, parliament, and government. Statistical studies have found some evidence for a “parliamentary peace,” but because of problematic indicators and a lack of controls, doubts remain about the robustness and significance of this effect. In any case, theories of legislative–executive relations in parliamentary systems suggest that open confrontations between parliament and government are exceptional. Instead of an institutional constraint in a system of checks and balances, parliamentary war powers can be understood as an additional reassurance against unpopular decisions to use force.
Most studies of parliaments in foreign affairs are characterized by “methodological nationalism”—that is, the assumption that nation-states are the natural units of analysis. However, parliaments’ activities in foreign affairs are not exhausted by their monitoring and scrutiny of national executives. In addition, there is a long tradition of “parliamentary diplomacy” and engagement in interparliamentary institutions. The most powerful parliamentary actor beyond the nation-state is the European Parliament. Although its formal competences are limited, it has been very effective in using its powers to influence European foreign policy.
