institution, in political science, a set of formal rules (including constitutions), informal norms, or shared understandings that constrain and prescribe political actors’ interactions with one another. Institutions are generated and enforced by both state and nonstate actors, such as professional and accreditation bodies. Within institutional frameworks, political actors may have more or less freedom to pursue and develop their individual preferences and tastes.
Institutions have always been a major subject of social science research, particularly in political science and sociology. Beginning in the 1980s, their importance was reinforced with the emergence of the methodological approach known as new institutionalism and its intellectual streams, including rational choice institutionalism, historical institutionalism, normative institutionalism, and sociological institutionalism.
Why do political actors adhere to institutions? From a rational choice institutional perspective, people follow norms because they want to avoid sanctions and maximize rewards. For instance, members of a parliament, in a parliamentary regime with closed-list elections, are more likely to adhere to norms of party discipline, in hopes of being remunerated with a future executive position, than are members of the U.S. Congress, who are less dependent on party leaders or the president of the United States for their future political career.
Normative institutionalism, however, explains individuals’ adherence to norms in reference to their perception of some actions as appropriate or inappropriate for people in their role. For instance, a minister may resign as a result of a crisis related to the ministerial department, following an informal norm of proper behaviour in such circumstances, regardless of whether the minister perceives that action as instrumental to future reelection prospects.
Sociological institutionalists claim that the strength of some institutions results from their taken-for-granted nature: political actors adhere to norms because they cannot conceive an alternative form of action. For example, a prime minister may respond to a political crisis by nominating an independent public inquiry, headed by a supreme court judge, because that has become the standard response to instances of crises.
Institutions have been shown to have a major impact on political processes and outcomes. Once again, the different theoretical approaches to institutions differ on the nature of that impact. Rational choice institutionalists emphasize institutions’ role in shaping the degree of stability and change in a political system through the determination of the number of people whose consent is necessary for a change in the status quo. Historical institutionalists highlight institutions’ path-dependent effect, whereby the contingent choice of one institution over another—for example, private over public provision of pensions—results in political actors’ investment in adaptation to the selected institution and therefore in its durability and in stable divergence of countries’ institutional forms. Conversely, normative and sociological institutionalists explain the convergence of governance regimes across countries—for example, privatization and the new public management reforms—as a result of the legitimacy of those institutional forms.