Institutional Design

Institutional design is a field that studies the game theoretic and comparative outcomes of structures.

Description

Institutional design is the study of how actors behave within an institution (or otherwise-defined rule set) and of how to shape an institution to yield certain behavior.

It implicitly assumes instrumentalism in that the form of institutions derives from utility rather than philosophy. Beyond this, it generally builds from either public choice or social choice methods for measuring and comparing utility.

For studies of democratic (little d, one-person-one-vote) voting rules, the theory of rational choice voting is the appropriate specialization.

Legislators are generally characterized by some combination of credit claiming and blame avoiding.

Reading Notes

• The Theory of Political Coalitions William H. Riker, 1962

• Congressmen in Committees, Richard F. Fenno, Jr., 1973

• Congress: The Electoral Connection, David R. Mayhew, 1974

• The Politics of Blame Avoidance, R. Kent Weaver, 1986

• Foreign Policy Begins at Home, Richard N. Haass, 2013

• The Limits of Party: Congress and Lawmaking in a Polarized Era, Frances E. Lee, 2020

• Dolce far niente? Non-compliance and blame avoidance in the EU; Lisa Kriegmair, Berthold Rittberger, Bernhard Zangl, and Tim Heinkelmann-Wild; 2021

• A Case for Congress: Shared Power for a Divided Society, Frances E. Lee, 2024

• Demanding more than what you want, Zuheir Desai and Scott A. Tyson, 2025

• Persistent unilateral action, David Foster, 2025

• Legislative reciprocity: Using a proposal lottery to identify causal effects, Semra Sevi and Donald P. Green, 2025

• Bureaucratic politics in customized implementation of the EU Single-Use Plastics Directive in France and Germany, Anna Simstich, 2025

• Company Towns: Single-Industry Dominance and Local Government Capacity, Elizabeth Mitchell Elder, 2025

• Decentralization and ideology; Anna M. Wilke, Georgiy Syunyaev, and Michael Ting; 2026

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