Chris Blattman

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What I’ve been reading: unconventional institutions and development literatures

I’ve been reading about institutional change and cooperation writ large in order to start to better understand institutional change at the micro-level. This has got me going back and reading older articles on institutions and change.

Most of the political economy and development literature seems to focus on national formal institutions, like courts and constitutions and executive constraints. Obviously important stuff. But less talked about are informal institutions like norms of acceptable behavior, how those come about and get enforced, and how (perhaps more importantly) they get internalized–meaning we punish ourselves if we violate them, rather than fearing what others will do. Internalization is handy because it means society doesn’t have sanction people in costly ways.

Some people think of this as “culture” and not “institutions”. I am not yet sure. While many scholars study norms and what they are and how they come about, I’m pretty sure this is not a literature that interacts much with with the people studying instituions in the political economy of development realm.

I have found some exceptions and especially liked these articles:

This is an unfamiliar realm for me, so more suggestions welcome. I have already ordered Bardhan’s book. How deeply sad I am that he only taught dreary trade theory rather than political economy at Berkeley.

28 Responses

  1. I’m interested in the same thing and these are great suggestions. On a more micro-level, can I recommend “The world we created at Hamilton High” for a close-up study of how Things Fall Apart and are then reconstituted? It’s a study of a US school but I suspect has much broader lessons.

  2. Oh, and by the by, on Huntington read:
    Colin Leys. 1982. “Samuel Huntington and the End of Classical Modernization Theory.” In Hamza Alavi and Teodor Shanin (eds.), Sociology of “Developing Societies,” pp. 332-349.

    Never was any book so widely read and respected so throughly dissected and left on the laboratory floor to rot then by this review. I quit taking Huntington seriously after I read it and I’ve never regretted the decision.

  3. two readings from a development course i took. Samuel Huntington ‘Political development and political decay’ in World Politics (1965) and Burki, Javed, Perry ‘Beyond the Washington Consensus: Institutions Matter’ World Bank (1998)

  4. Interesting post. I’d recommend Mushtaq Khan’s institutional political economy work on rent-seeking and development in Asia and particularly the Indian subcontinent.

  5. An old classic…Sally Falk Moore’s “Law as Process”; particularly in regard to the concept of “semi-autonomous social groups” as a locus for understanding how social change is influenced at a local level.

  6. Also check out Chwe’s “Rational Ritual” on coordination and common knowledge, Boyd and Richerson’s “Culture and the Evolutionary Process” on cultural transmission and survival, Thomas Schelling on focal points and coordination, Robert Sugden’s “Spontaneous Order” on how rules evolve and survive, and David Laitin’s “Marginality: A Micro Perspective” on why norms sometimes persist when they don’t seem instrumentally productive.

  7. You could check out Arild Vatn’s book ‘Institutionas and the Environment’, as well as his articles on institutions. He writes mostly about the environment (and some about agriculture), however, his institutional perspective is refreshing and thought provoking, and applicable in a wider context.

    See his book here: http://www.amazon.com/Institutions-Environment-Arild-Vatn/dp/1847201210/

    Google.scholar search here: http://scholar.google.no/scholar?q=arild+vatn+institutions&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5

  8. I guess what you are looking for is somewhat similar to the stuff Elinor Ostrom got her Nobel Prize for. But you heiner may be essential here:

    Ronald A. Heiner 1990. “Rule-governed behavior in evolution and human society.” Const. Pol. Economy 1:19-46

    Ronald A. Heiner 1993. “The origin of predictable behavior.” AER 73

  9. I presume you’ve already read Ellickson’s “Order without Law” and his earlier article on the whaling industry. Check out the two-part 1994 article by Jean-Philippe Platteau in the Journal of Development Studies — “Beyond the Market Stage Where Real Societies Exist,” parts 1 and 2.

  10. Chapter 3 of Elinor Ostrom’s Understanding Institutional Diversity has a very good discussion of laboratory game theory experiments and how participants are able or unable to establish norms for collective action given constraints on communication and information. The whole book is a good synthesis.

  11. +1 to Order without Law, and Evans-Pritchard on the Nuer is in the same class of informal institutions. I hope you’ll blog frequently about what you’re learning, it is a fascinating topic.

  12. Jean Philippe Platteau has done a lot of very interesting work in this area, he has a book that is a great introduction.

  13. You might like this book about the emergence of the institutions that manage irrigation systems and practices in Bali: http://www.amazon.com/Perfect-Order-Recognizing-Complexity-Princeton/dp/0691027277
    The author is an anthropologist at the Santa Fe Institute and he does a fascinating job of combining ethnography with systematic analysis of how cooperative institutions emerge from informal interactions among individuals and communities. I think it’s quite along the lines of what you’re talking about here.

    You might also check out the Center for Behavior, Evolution and Culture at UCLA: http://www.bec.ucla.edu/index.php
    and Joe Henrich’s work at UBC: http://www.psych.ubc.ca/faculty/profile/index.psy?fullname=Henrich,%20Joseph&area=Social/Personality&designation=core They both provide several good examples of rigorous and informative work on “culture” and “institutions” (I put those terms in quotation marks because I usually find them to be unhelpfully vague and filled with all kinds of hidden assumptions and assertions without evidence).

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