Routledge Handbook of Comparative Political Institutions

Jennifer Gandhi, Rubén Ruiz-Rufino, Jennifer Gandhi, Rubén Ruiz-Rufino

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317551782
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Internationale Beziehungen

The Routledge Handbook of Comparative Political Institutions (HCPI) is designed to serve as a comprehensive reference guide to our accumulated knowledge and the cutting edge of scholarship about political institutions in the comparative context. It differs from existing handbooks in that it focuses squarely on institutions but also discusses how they intersect with the study of mass behaviour and explain important outcomes, drawing on the perspective of comparative politics. The Handbook is organized into three sections:

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• The first section, consisting of six chapters, is organized around broad theoretical and empirical challenges affecting the study of institutions. It highlights the major issues that emerge among scholars defining, measuring, and analyzing institutions.

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• The second section includes fifteen chapters, each of which handles a different substantive institution of importance in comparative politics. This section covers traditional topics, such as electoral rules and federalism, as well as less conventional but equally important areas, including authoritarian institutions, labor market institutions, and the military. Each chapter not only provides a summary of our current state of knowledge on the topic, but also advances claims that emphasise the research frontier on the topic and that should encourage greater investigation.

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• The final section, encompassing seven chapters, examines the relationship between institutions and a variety of important outcomes, such as political violence, economic performance, and voting behavior. The idea is to consider what features of the political, sociological, and economic world we understand better because of the scholarly attention to institutions.

Featuring contributions from leading researchers in the field from the US, UK, Europe and elsewhere, this Handbook will be of great interest to all students and scholars of political institutions, political behaviour and comparative politics.

Jennifer Gandhi is Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Emory University.

Rubén Ruiz-Rufino is Lecturer in International Politics, Department of Political Economy, King's College London.

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INTRODUCTION

Jennifer Gandhi and Rubén Ruiz-Rufino

Introduction

“Institutions matter” has served as a mantra for the social sciences for almost thirty years. In political science, scholars in the subfield of comparative politics embraced this intellectual agenda by first “bringing the state back in” (Evans et al. 1985). Since then, comparative politics has focused much attention on institutions, and at this point, it seems appropriate to ask: What is our accumulated knowledge about political institutions in the comparative context, and how have we acquired it? Where have debates in the study of institutions emerged and how have scholars resolved them? What remains to be done in the comparative study of institutions? In this volume, we address these questions by having leading scholars in the field discuss their areas of substantive and methodological expertise.

The volume is organized into three parts. Part I focuses on broad theoretical and empirical challenges affecting the study of institutions. The six chapters of this part highlight the major issues that emerge among scholars defining and analyzing institutions. The chapters discuss how these challenges have been handled since the “institutionalist revolution” in political science and highlight the open questions that still bedevil the study of institutions. Part II of the volume consists of fifteen chapters, each of which handles a different substantive institution of importance in comparative politics. In this part, we cover institutions, such as electoral rules and federalism, whose study is well established in the field. But we also expand our focus to include areas that traditionally either have attracted less attention or have not been aggregated as a separate area within comparative politics. These include authoritarian institutions, the military, and electoral management bodies. The final part, Part III, encompassing seven chapters, examines the relationship between institutions and a variety of important outcomes, such as political violence, economic performance, and voting behavior. The idea is to consider what features of the political, sociological, and economic world we understand better because of the scholarly attention to institutions.

Because our contributors discuss the state of our knowledge and what constitutes the research frontier in their specific areas, each chapter offers its own answers to the questions posed above. But on the basis of these chapters, we also can offer a more synthetic account of what we broadly know about institutions, how we know it, and what remains to be studied. We begin by discussing how comparative scholars have developed institutionalist theories: how they have borrowed from other subfields, confronted the tension between generalist and more time- or place-specific claims, and used a variety of tools to craft their arguments. We then go on to discuss two recurring themes in the volume that highlight how many comparative scholars view institutions: first, the use of institutions to address strategic dilemmas and, second, how institutions both incentivize behavior and are created by purposive action. Understanding institutions both as rules and as equilibria opens up a host of theoretical and empirical challenges. We review these challenges that confront the general study of institutions before discussing the open debates surrounding some of the specific substantive institutions that have been highlighted by authors in the volume. These last two sections clearly show that while we have accumulated substantial knowledge about comparative institutions, there is still much work to be done.

The sources and scope of our institutional theories

In developing theoretical arguments about the emergence and effects of institutions, it is clear that many areas of comparative institutional analysis have borrowed and built upon the frameworks first developed in the study of American politics. In his chapter on legislative organization and outcomes (Chapter 11), Eduardo Alemán discusses the rationale for legislative rules as well as their impact in distributing gatekeeping and agenda-setting powers which, in turn, influence passage rates and the substantive content of legislation. Many of the theories—explaining both why a majority of legislators would adopt organizational arrangements that occasionally make them worse off and how such organizational rules can pull policy outcomes away from the median legislator’s preferences—have been developed in the context of studying behavior in the U.S. House of Representatives. As Alemán notes, scholars in comparative politics are using these theoretical frameworks to make sense of legislative behavior and outcomes in other places around the world, and in the process they are able to comment on the extent to which these theories are generalizable beyond the American context.

Similarly, in his chapter on fiscal institutions (Chapter 20), Joachim Wehner points out that much of the early empirical work on budget institutions focused on the American states. These works focused on the effects of institutions such as formal budget rules and legislative committee structures on fiscal adjustment and policy outcomes. Due to the variation in institutions and outcomes across a large number of comparable units, the American states serve as a good laboratory to investigate the effects of fiscal institutions. In recent years, as comparative scholars have increasingly accumulated cross-national data on budget institutions, policies, and outcomes, they have been able to test theories that were developed within the American context as well as others that take into account comparative institutional differences.

In some contexts, this crossover continues to be influential in the development of comparative studies. In other cases, scholars are questioning to what extent institutional theories or theories of institutions developed within the context of established democracies (e.g. the US, Western Europe) are helpful in understanding these same types of institutions in other areas of the world. In his chapter on party politics (Chapter 10), Noam Lupu tackles this issue by noting that the variation in how parties emerge, how they persist or change over time, and how they differ in their strategies for appealing to voters in many parts of the world cannot be fully accounted for by extant theories of parties that were developed in the context of American and Western European parties. The discrepancy between received theories and empirical realities can be handled in two different ways. Splitters argue that theories derived from the experiences of the advanced democracies fail to apply to other places, and as a result alternative explanations must be developed. Lumpers, in contrast, attempt to generate broad theoretical frameworks that incorporate prior theories of party politics but still enable us to make sense of diverging empirical patterns.

The challenge, of course, is in building theories that are general but that still account for historically and contextually distinct paths. The difficulty of the endeavor should not be underestimated, as noted by Gabriel Negretto in his chapter on electoral systems (Chapter 9). Most explanations of the origins and reform of electoral systems draw from the experience of Western European states at the beginning of the twentieth century that underwent a shift from majoritarian to proportional systems. But, as Negretto argues, it is clear that outside of Western Europe, proportional representation (PR) was adopted under historical conditions that were quite different: greater uncertainty over which systems would benefit established parties, political elites without full control over the reform process, and other goals of reform besides short-term partisan interests. As a result, while the adoption of PR in places such as Latin America can be considered within the general framework of actors behaving strategically to achieve their interests, historical specificities may render impossible any attempt to generate a general theory of electoral reform.

Of course, there are sometimes very good contextual reasons for limiting the scope of our research questions and theories. In their chapter on the military (Chapter 18), Aurel Croissant and David Kuehn observe that the research questions surrounding the study of the military vary by regime type. In authoritarian regimes, the focus has been on understanding military coups and military regimes. In new democracies, the most significant issue is how to establish civilian control over the military, while in established democracies scholars examine how civil–military relations play out when norms and institutions already have established civilian primacy over the military. That the research agenda is segmented by regime type is, in part, a reflection of real-world concerns. Establishing civilian control, for example, is a critical question for many new democracies, but less so for established democracies. But since these research foci are interrelated and countries sometimes transition across regimes, scholars studying the military under different regimes still have much to learn from each other. In investigating how contemporary new democracies might establish civilian control, for example, the historical experience of established democracies in tackling this issue may be instructive.

Moreover, that contextual differences exist is not a reason to cease thinking and conversing broadly about institutions. For one, the substantive context studied by scholars in one subfield may have explicit relevance for phenomena under investigation by scholars in another subfield. James Raymond Vreeland (Chapter 22) directly addresses this type of symbiosis between comparative politics and international relations scholars. Governments must be incentivized to join international organizations (IOs). Interstate relations may strongly structure their incentives, but so do domestic factors. So in order to understand why states join IOs, how IOs are structured and operate, and what are their effects, it is critical to know something about the domestic politics of these states. Comparative scholars, in turn, will have a better understanding of some features of domestic institutions, policies, and outcomes if they factor in the effects of IOs.

More broadly, as the examples in this chapter and across the chapters in the Handbook illustrate, the structure of the problem confronting actors in one substantive context often resembles the one that emerges in a very different environment. The challenge for scholars, then, is to consider how specifics of a place or time require modification of extant institutional theories to account for the specific phenomena of interest. In order to do so, they must know about those existing theories which may require knowledge about an institution in another time and place. For this reason, in their chapter on the study of institutions (Chapter 3), Tom Clark and Jennifer Gandhi call for more collaboration not only across subfields, but also across substantive areas. To take one example: if the object of study is the agency problem among parties within a coalition government, it is useful not only to know how coalition governments operate in many parts of the world, but also to learn about how the agency problem functions in other substantive contexts (e.g. bureaucrats and legislators, elected officials and voters).

Formal theory, as Milan Svolik argues in his chapter (Chapter 6), is well placed to enable scholars to engage in this type of inquiry across substantive areas. Institutional rules usually delineate the participants, their available actions and information, and the procedures by which their actions translate into outcomes—all elements required in a game theoretic model. Furthermore, the participants often have conflicting interests, requiring them to behave strategically to get what they want. Whether this means making strategic decisions within the constraints established by institutional rules or making them about the choice of institutions, the rationality assumptions underpinning formal theory are reasonable even if models necessarily require some abstraction from reality.

Institutions as solutions to strategic dilemmas

Because institutions are explicitly rules, incentives, and constraints on individual actors, scholars studying institutions have become more attuned to the microfoundations of their explanatory accounts. As Diermeier and Krehbiel (2003: 126) point out: “The crucial link between institutions (as contextual constraints) and outcomes (as consequences of collective choice) is behavior.” In order to determine that institutions affect outcomes and how they do so, it is critical that we draw as sharp a line as possible between institutions and behavior, and specify and show how these incentives and constraints influence actions. Theoretically, scholars have been thinking carefully about the strategic dilemmas that confront political actors and how institutions address (or do not address) them. Throughout the work on a variety of different substantive institutions, the problems of coordination, commitment, and agency appear, and institutions serve as solutions to these dilemmas.

Coordination

Actors may be better off coordinating their actions, but individual rationality frequently does not lead to collective rationality. In such situations, institutions may act as a coordinating device. It is possible, for example, to organize the structure of government in a variety of ways, but constant renegotiation over it is detrimental to political life. Institutional instability inhibits the formation of plans and expectations and prevents actors from solving “lower-order” problems. Constitutions, as Tom Ginsburg points out in his chapter (Chapter 8), may address this problem by laying out a structure of government that serves as a focal point for actors. By offering a blueprint for how government works, a constitution enables individuals to coordinate their beliefs, expectations, and actions. Besides enabling action, however, constitutions can serve to constrain government within limits. By generating an intersubjective understanding of what constitutes appropriate state action, constitutions may help coordinate citizens so that they can credibly threaten punishment of a government that exceeds its limits.

In his chapter on judicial institutions (Chapter 14), Julio Ríos-Figueroa observes that courts may serve a similar function. Courts may convey relevant information about government misconduct and signal when rulers have overstepped constitutional bounds. Thus, judicial rulings serve an important informational role that aids citizens in determining when government has committed a transgression, which is the first step in developing a coordinated response to restrain it.

Commitment

When actors’ preferences are time inconsistent, institutions may enable them to make credible commitments. As Ríos-Figueroa points out, judicial institutions play this role as well. Courts can serve as a commitment device for an executive or legislature interested in signaling its intention to protect property rights. He points out that courts can serve as such a commitment device, however, only in so far as their rulings command compliance—not a trivial detail given that courts lack enforcement power.

The problem of enforcement also plagues institutions as a means for resolving conflict. The problem is that peace agreements—like constitutions and laws—are just pieces of paper. So any promises to disarm or refrain from violent actions made now may not appear credible in the future, especially if the actors involved retain their capacity to use force. In her chapter on the relationship between institutions and political violence (Chapter 26), Laia Balcells notes that there are domestic and international institutions that can alleviate this commitment problem among civil war combatants, influencing the likelihood of war termination and the duration of peace. But there is no “one size fits all” solution, and as a result, “there are a lot of context-dependent factors that affect their likelihood of success” (p. 381).

Agency

When actors delegate authority to an agent, problems of hidden information or hidden action frequently emerge. Institutional structure often determines the extent of agency loss. In their chapter on federalism (Chapter 15), Pablo Beramendi and Sandra León point out that the degree to which the regions are able to shirk or the center “overawes” them depends on the precise nature of federal institutions, including their fiscal authority as well as the interdependence between the national and regional electoral arenas. As a result, the variance in outcomes among federal countries is often as large as what exists between federal and unitary states.

In some cases, institutions are able to directly minimize the degree of agency loss. Lanny Martin and Georg Vanberg in their chapter on parliamentary government (Chapter 13), for example, discuss the agency problem among parties within a coalition government. Parties must figure out how to insure that their coalition partners will enact policy that is acceptable to the coalition as a whole for the ministries that they control. Martin and Vanberg highlight the importance of strong legislative institutions in enabling coalition partners to monitor and enforce policy agreements and thus mitigate the moral hazard problem.

Institutions-as-rules and institutions-as-equilibria

Institutions and their effects

If actors use institutions to address particular strategic dilemmas, it must be true that they believe that institutions have important effects on behavior and outcomes. Otherwise, there would be little point in employing such institutions as solutions. So it seems appropriate that much of the literature on institutions examines how they serve as rules or constraints on behavior and, as a result, have important effects on a var...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction
• PART I Approaches to studying institutions
• PART II Comparative political institutions
• PART III The effects of comparative institutions
• Index