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

If assumptions about rationality and utility functions are not being made, the work is better classified under comparative politics.

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

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

• Incentives to Cultivate a Personal Vote: a Rank Ordering of Electoral Formulas, Matthew Shugart and John Carey, 1995

• Judicial Behavior under Political Constraints: Evidence from the European Court of Justice; Clifford J. Carrubba, Matthew Gabel, and Charles Hankla; 2008

• 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

• Democracy and Multilateralism: The Case of Vote Buying in the UN General Assembly, David B. Carter and Randall W. Stone, 2015

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

• 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

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

• How Firms, Bureaucrats, and Ministries Benefit from the Revolving Door: Evidence from Japan, Trevor Incerti, 2026

• Policymaking activities of caretaker governments in Western Europe, Mingyi Zhang, 2026

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