Modernization Programs in Perspective: Institutional Analysis of Organizational Change

Contemporary reform programs give students of comparative public administration a new chance to update their theoretical ideas about organization and organizing. Do forms of government and political institution matter? If so, what are the effects of different organizational forms? Why do we have the institutional forms we have? How can we explain their origins, persistence and development? This article explores the possible value of organization theory for the study of comprehensive administration reform. An attempt is made to specify how modernization efforts may be affected by properties of existing institutions. It is argued that contemporary modernization programs are based on an instrumental view of organizational decision-making and change. An institutional perspective is then outlined.     

The Institutional Basis of Democratic Accountability

This article offers an institutional approach to accountability in representative democracies. Theorising accountability comprises both settled polities with well-entrenched institutions and unsettled polities with weak or contested institutions, and it is argued that agency theory and formal principal–agent models giving priority to compliance and control usually make assumptions that are unlikely to apply to the latter type of polity. An institutional approach challenges principal–agent assumptions regarding what accountability means and implies, what is involved in demanding, rendering, assessing and responding to accounts and assigning accountability, and how accountability institutions work and change. Accountability is related to fundamental issues in democratic politics and the paper treats distributions of information, normative standards of assessment, authority and power relations as endogenous to democratic politics. The paper also holds that institutions affect actors’ identities and roles through socialisation, internalisation and habitualisation, as well as through external incentives. An aspiration is to take a modest step towards understanding areas of application for competing approaches to democratic accountability.     

New Institutionalist Explanations for Institutional Change: A Note of Caution

This article demonstrates the explanatory poverty of new institutionalist hypotheses on institutional change. The new institutionalism fails to provide an adequate explanation of institutional change because, by relying on variables such as critical junctures, path dependency, leadership or the role of ideas, it leaves institutions behind and employs a grab-bag of explanations that proponents of almost any theoretical perspective could use. The conditions under which these variables matter are unspecified and the causal relevance of institutions themselves is unclear. New institutionalists should specify more rigorously the factors that change institutions and explicate the links between these factors and institutional change. Doing so, however, could mean abandoning their emphasis on the primacy of institutions in developing explanations for political phenomena.     

Explaining Australian Economic Success: Good Policy or Good Luck?

Australia and some European countries experienced economic “miracles” in the 1990s that reversed prior poor export, employment, and fiscal performance. The miracles might provide transferable lessons about economic governance if it were true that economic governance institutions are malleable, and that actors deliberately changed those institutions in ways that contributed to the miracles. This paper analyzes Australian policy responses to see whether remediation should be attributed to pluck (intentional, strategic remediation of dysfunctional institutions to make them conform with the external environment), luck (environmental change that makes formerly dysfunctional institutions suddenly functional), or just being stuck (endogenous or path‐dependent change that brings institutions into conformity with the environment). These distinctions help establish whether actors can consciously engineer institutional change that is “off‐path.” While pluck appears to explain more than either stuck or luck in the Australian case, the analysis suggests that both off‐path behavior and policy transfer are probably rare.     

Globalization and institutional competitiveness

Only dead institutions do not change and only rarely do institutions change by themselves. To maintain performing institutions takes institutional entrepreneurs who are willing to take risks and who possess the capacity and the talent to innovate. A regulation discourse, in contrast to a marketization discourse, would not picture the relationship between globalization and institutional change as a deterministic one. Rather, it would expect that all kinds of actors play a large number of different roles in the course of ongoing institutional change. The result of such complex institutional change, at the level of welfare states, multinational businesses, public administration, and training systems, to mention just a few of the empirical areas covered in this special issue, cannot be fully understood by applying an overly rigid, static, and dualistic approach to modern capitalist economies. The concept of institutional competitiveness, on the contrary, allows for institutional entrepreneurship and institutional hybrids constituting pulsating polities.     

Rational Choice and Dysfunctional Institutions

As stated elsewhere in this issue, we cannot claim to explain an institution's origin just by the functions it serves. In part thismay be because of the cognitive limitations of those actors who are instrumental in institutional formation and institutional change. But even more clearly, it is the case that rational instrumental choice does not imply functional institutions. Just as rational choice in a prisoner's dilemma may result in inefficient policies, rational choice by actors with conflicting preferencesfor institutions may result in institutions that are suboptimal. Examples of rational choice explanations of dysfunctional institutions are provided in the area of bureaucracy, regulation, healthcare, and budgeting. I argue that the paradoxes and impossibility results of rational choice theory offer the best insights currently available into the persistent inefficiencies of the world ofpolitics.     

Unpacking the Path‐Dependent Process of Institutional Change for PPPs

In the recent past, several countries and states have begun to use Public‐Private‐Partnerships (PPPs) for infrastructure development and have attempted to create institutional environments that enable PPPs. Providing an enabling environment for PPPs entails a combination of institutional creation and changing existing institutions relating to project procurement. This paper attempts to understand how path‐dependant institutional change takes place in the context of PPPs and their enabling environments, and why different institutional environments evolve differently, using two cases: the implementation of PPPs in the road sector in the Netherlands and in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. We identify two factors that can be used as predictors of the direction of institutional change: a long‐term orientation towards institutional change and a willingness to learn and modify transitional institutions. Where these factors exist, and thereby provide a goodness of fit, institutional change is likely to occur.     

Institutional Perspectives on Political Institutions

This article examines some basic assumptions about the nature of political institutions, the ways in which practices and rules that comprise institutions are established, sustained, and transformed, and the ways in which those practices and rules are converted into political behavior through the mediation of interpretation and capability. We discuss an institutional approach to political life that emphasizes the endogenous nature and social construction of political institutions, identities, accounts, and capabilities.     

Bargaining Power, Political Transaction Costs and Institutional Change: Private and Public Dental Care in Denmark1

Rational choice institutionalism underexposes institutional change as well as the interaction between institutions at different levels, and this article therefore investigates national and local institutional change. In the Danish dental care sector private and public provision of services have coexisted since the establishment of a publicly financed dental health care system, and the fight between supporters of the two solutions has generated many institutional changes, both nationally and locally. This article analyses all Danish parliamentary proposals and local decisions regarding dental care coverage and provision. The general finding is that increasing pro-public bargaining power seems to promote higher coverage and public provision, while increasing pro-private bargaining power leads to stable coverage and private provision. The institutions do not, however, change whenever bargaining power changes, and national institutional change does not necessarily result in local change. The article explains this in terms of political transaction costs. These costs might also explain why national institutions change more often than local ones, and why local pro-public changes are faster and more frequent than local pro-private changes.     

Electoral institutions, partisan status, and political support in Lesotho

Does the introduction of proportionality in electoral systems help to boost popular evaluations of democracy? This article takes advantage of an electoral reform in Lesotho to conduct a natural experiment. We trace shifts over time in popular political support, using Afrobarometer data collected before and after reform to measure mass satisfaction with democracy and public trust in political institutions. We find both direct and indirect effects. In the aggregate, Lesotho's transition from a majoritarian to a mixed electoral system is directly associated with increased levels of citizen support for the country's state and regime. Importantly, however, formal institutions have only indirect effects at the individual level, where a person's informal partisan status – as a member of a winning majority or losing minority – mediates the impacts of institutional change.     

反思与进展:新制度主义政治学的制度变迁理论

新制度主义政治理论被认为更有助于解释制度稳定与维持,而对制度变迁解释乏力,因为它仅把制度变迁看作是由外生因素引起的。面对这种批评,近年来,新制度主义者提出制度变迁的内生理论,并试图与外生理论结合起来,把制度的起源、稳定维持和急剧变动看成是一个统一的演化过程,更加注重制度变迁的历时与空间维度,对制度变迁中观念与制度的相互作用给予了更多的关注,洞悉路径依赖的多样性及其解释制度变迁的可能性。另外,制度变迁的动力与具体方式,制度的分层等问题也成为研究制度变迁的议题。新制度主义者的这些努力大大丰富了新制度主义对制度变迁的解释,增强了其理论说服力,但并没有解决批评者提出的所有问题,同时还带来了不少新问题。     

Social Accountability and Institutional Change: The Case of Citizen Oversight of Police

This article examines the ability of social accountability to spur gradual institutional change at the municipal level, using the case of citizen oversight agencies (COAs) for police agencies. Using the gradual change framework and the social accountability framework to guide the empirical strategy and data collected through an original survey of COAs, the authors test the impact of COAs on institutional outcomes in policing. We find that, in accordance with the gradual change framework, the degree to which a COA reduces racial disparity in policing outcomes depends on its scope of authority and the degree of discretion afforded by existing institutions to police officers. In general, the wider the scope of authority, and the broader the discretion afforded by existing institutions, the greater the likelihood of change in institutional outcomes.     

The fable of policy entrepreneurship? Understanding policy change as an ontological problem with critical realism and institutional theory

How is policy change possible if policy entrepreneurs’ cognition, rationality and identity are conditioned by the very policy institutions they wish to change? To solve this paradox of embedded agency, we must avoid either voluntarism that inflates the role of actors to change policies as by existing policy entrepreneurship applications, or determinism whereby policy changes are decided by contextual forces. Instead, drawing on institutional theory, critical realism sees structures, institutions, and actions that constitute policy dynamics as existing in separate yet intertwined reality domains: structures (e.g., social relationships), and institutions (e.g., formal rules and norms such as institutional logics) in the Real domain, enable and constrain policy actors’ navigation of their social environments; the Actual domain represents the level at which events (actions) happen, as these actors constantly interpret varied institutions to adjust their structurally embedded actions when pursuing policy changes that can be observed in the Empirical domain. Put differently, structures and institutions are mechanisms in the Real domain that affect individual practices and events in the Actual domain, and only some of these events are realized in the Empirical domain as policy changes. We empirically illustrate this critical realist approach with a Chinese example on health care reform.

     

The calculus of corruption: a paradox of ‘strong’ corruption amidst ‘strong’ systems and institutions in developing administrative systems

Without the right political will to battle corruption, systems and institutions are put in place and tend to be façade and window dressing. Ghana, especially, in the new millennium has seen the proliferation of various institutions ostensibly to curb the phenomenon of corruption, yet its impact has only been marginal. This study adopts two models of corruption to critically assess the institutional development of Ghana since the Fourth Republican Dispensation and how these institutions have impacted the fight against corruption. The study adopts mainly secondary data and resources from the 1992 Republican Constitution, Acts of Parliaments and Legislative Instruments relevant corruption combat. An analysis of the corruption perception index of Ghana from 2000 to 2014 and other data portrays poor performance. What accounts for this phenomenon? Are there really demons who obstruct the spirit and letter of the institutions? Are the systems weak or the human elements (demons) rather stronger in adapting and outsmarting the institutions? Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Democratic Government,Institutional Autonomy and the Dynamics of Change

Against the backdrop of decades of public sector reforms in Europe, this essay aims to make sense of the processes through which institutions, democratic government included, achieve and lose autonomy or primacy and why it is difficult to find a state of equilibrium between democratic government and institutional autonomy. The analytical value of ‘autonomy’ as detachment-from-politics and the apolitical dynamics of change assumed by NPM reformers are challenged. In contrast, the interplay between democratic government and institutional autonomy is interpreted as an artefact of partly de-coupled inter-institutional processes involving struggle for power and status among interdependent and co-evolving institutions that are carriers of competing yet legitimate values, interests and behavioural logics. The problem of finding a stable equilibrium between democratic government, autonomous agencies and non-majoritarian institutions is illustrated by the cases of public administration and the public university.     

How preferences,information and institutions interactively drive agenda‐setting: Questions in the Belgian parliament, 1993–2000

In this article an integrated framework of agenda‐setting is proposed that incorporates the two main accounts of agenda‐setting: the information‐processing approach by Comparative Agenda Project scholars and the preference‐centred account advanced by Comparative Manifestoes Project scholars. The study claims that attention allocation is determined at the same time by preferences, information and institutions, and that attention allocation is affected by the interactions between these three factors. An empirical test is conducted that draws upon a dataset of parliamentary questions/interpellations in Belgium in the period 1993–2000. It is found that attention in parliament is indeed driven by preceding party manifestos (preferences), by available information (media coverage) and by institutional position (government or opposition party). The evidence establishes that agenda‐setting is also affected by the interactions between preferences, information and institutions. Actors, given their preferences, treat information in a biased fashion, and institutions moderate information's role.     

Employers,the state and the politics of institutional change: Vocational education and training in Austria,Germany and Switzerland

An in‐depth comparison of Austria, Germany and Switzerland shows that the employers' constellation and the elites of the public education administration affect patterns of institutional change. If large firms are the dominant actors and collaborate with elites in the public education administration, institutional change follows a transformative pattern. If small and medium‐sized firms are in a strong position and have the power to influence public elites according to their interests, self‐preserving institutional change results. The article also shows that it is not so much trade unions as small and medium‐sized firms that act as a brake on transformative change. The article adds to the literature of institutional change by arguing that specifying and explaining patterns of institutional change requires that sufficient scope be allowed for actors' creative handling of institutions. It also suggests that in order to differentiate between self‐preserving and transformative change, one has to specify the important institutional dimensions that sustain an institution. The article combines Mill's method of agreement and difference.     

Varieties of Capitalism and the Euro Crisis

This article examines the role played by varieties of capitalism in the euro crisis, considering the origins of the crisis, its progression, and the response to it. Deficiencies in the institutional arrangements governing the single currency are linked to economic doctrines of the 1990s. The roots of the crisis are linked to institutional asymmetries between political economies. Northern European economies equipped to operate export-led growth models suitable for success within a monetary union are joined to southern economies whose demand-led growth models were difficult to operate successfully without the capacity to devalue. The response to a tripartite crisis of confidence, debt, and growth is explained in terms of the interaction of institutions, interests, and ideas, and its importance for the future of European integration is explored.     

Legitimation as justification: Foregrounding public philosophies in explanations of gradual ideational change

In accounts of institutional change, discursive institutionalists point to the role of economic and political ideas in upending institutional stability and providing the raw material for the establishment of a new institutional setup. This approach has typically entailed a conceptualisation of ideas as coherent and monolithic and actors as almost automatically following the precepts of the ideas they hold and support. Recent theorising stresses how ideas are in fact composite and heterogeneous, and actors pragmatic and strategic in how they employ ideas in political struggles. However, this change of focus has, until recently, not included how foundational ideas of a polity, often referred to as ‘public philosophies’, are theorised to impact on institution-building. Drawing on French Pragmatic Sociology, and taking as a starting point recent efforts within discursive institutionalism to conceptualise the dynamic nature of public philosophies, this article seeks to foreground moral justification in accounts of ideational and institutional change. It suggests that public philosophies are reflexively used by actors in continual processes of normative justification that may produce significant policy shifts over time. The empirical relevance of the argument is demonstrated through an analysis of gradual ideational and institutional change in French labour market policy, specifically the development from the state-guaranteed minimum income scheme of 1988 to the neoliberal make-work-pay logic of the 2009 scheme, Revenu de solidarité active. The analysis shows that public and moral justifications have underpinned and gradually shaped these radical changes.     

Europeanization and Institutional Change in Vocational Education and Training in Austria and Germany

This article analyzes how the EU's vocational education and training (VET) policy is reflected in domestic reforms in Germany and Austria. It perceives Europeanization as a heuristic concept to disentangle a twofold process of institutional change: The first process, the "Europeanized" arena of change, concerns change initiated by the reactions of domestic actors to EU initiatives; the second process of change—the "domestic" arena of change—concerns the ongoing incremental endogenous change in domestic institutions beneath and independent from the Europeanized arena of institutional change. This procedure allows us to differentiate between two modes of Europeanization: In Germany, Europeanization occurs as reform policies and politics; in Austria, Europeanization occurs more as institutional change by default, hence without strategically enacted reform initiatives shaped by the EU and as domestic institutional change that occurs anyway. The article combines the case-oriented method of difference with process tracing.