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

• The Closed Rule and the Paradox of Voting, John C. Blydenburgh, 1971

• 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

• Centralized versus decentralized provision of local public goods: a political economy approach, Timothy Besley and Stephen Coate, 2003

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

• Did Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison “Cause” the U.S. Government Shutdown? The Institutional Path from an Eighteenth Century Republic to a Twenty-first Century Democracy, John H. Aldrich, 2015

• 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

• Agency, institutions, and welfare chauvinism: Tracing the exclusion of European Union migrant citizens from social assistance in Germany; Dominic Afscharian, Cecilia Bruzelius, and Martin Seeleib-Kaiser; 2024

• When incumbents successfully retrench big and popular social policies: policy design matters, Marta Arretche and Pedro H. G. F. Souza, 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

• Who Knows How to Govern? Procedural Knowledge in India’s Small-Town Councils; Adam Michael Auerbach, Shikhar Singh, and Tariq Thachil; 2025

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

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