Institutional Design
Institutional design is a field that studies the game theoretic and comparative outcomes of structures.
Contents
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
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
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
Decentralization and ideology; Anna M. Wilke, Georgiy Syunyaev, and Michael Ting; 2026