Over the last two decades, institutional analysis has become a
central focus in comparative politics. Fueled by a wave of
institutional change in the developing and postcommunist worlds,
scholars from diverse research traditions have studied how
constitutional design, electoral systems, and other formal
institutional arrangements affect political and economic outcomes.1
For an excellent survey of this literature,
see Carey 2000.
These studies have
produced important theoretical advances.
Nevertheless, a growing body of research on Latin America,2
postcommunist
Eurasia,
3 Africa,
4 and
Asia
5 suggests that many
“rules of the game” that structure political life are
informal—created, communicated, and enforced outside of
officially sanctioned channels.
6 Examples abound. For decades, Mexican presidents
were selected not according to rules in the Constitution, the electoral
law, or party statutes, but rather via the
dedazo (“big
finger”)—an unwritten code that gave the sitting president
the right to choose his successor, specified the candidate pool, and
prohibited potential candidates from openly seeking the job.
7 In Japan, the “strict but unwritten
rules” of
Amakudari (“descent from heaven”),
through which retiring state bureaucrats are awarded top positions in
private corporations, have survived decades of administrative
reform.
8 In Central Asia, clan-based norms have
“become the rules of the game,” while the constitutional
structures created after the collapse of the Soviet Union are
“increasingly … inconsequential.”
9
And in much of the developing and postcommunist world, patterns of
clientelism, corruption, and patrimonialism coexist with (and often
subvert) new democratic, market, and state institutions.
10 Attention to informal institutions is by no means new to political
science. Earlier studies of “prismatic societies,”11
“moral economies,”
12
“economies of affection,”
13 legal
pluralism,
14
clientelism,
15
corruption,
16 and
consociationalism,
17 as well as on
government-business relations in Japan,
18 blat in the Soviet
Union,
19 and the “folkways” of the U.S.
Senate
20 highlighted the importance of unwritten rules.
Nevertheless, informal rules have remained at the margins of the
institutionalist turn in comparative politics. Indeed, much current
literature assumes that actors' incentives and expectations are
shaped primarily, if not exclusively, by formal rules. Such a narrow
focus can be problematic, for it risks missing much of what drives
political behavior and can hinder efforts to explain important
political phenomena.
21 This article broadens the scope of comparative research on political
institutions by laying the foundation for a systematic analysis of
informal rules. Our motivation is simple: good institutional analysis
requires rigorous attention to both formal and informal rules. Careful
attention to informal institutions is critical to understanding the
incentives that enable and constrain political behavior. Political
actors respond to a mix of formal and informal incentives,22
and in some instances, informal incentives trump
the formal ones. In postwar Italy, for example, norms of corruption
were “more powerful than the laws of the state: the latter could
be violated with impunity, while anyone who challenged the conventions
of the illicit market would meet with certain punishment.”
23 To take a different example, although
Brazilian state law prohibits extra-judicial executions, informal rules
and procedures within the public security apparatus enable and even
encourage police officers to engage in such killing.
24 Thus officers who kill suspected
violent criminals know they will be protected from prosecution and
possibly rewarded with a promotion or bonus.
25 In such
cases, a strict analysis of the formal rules would be woefully
insufficient to understand the incentives driving behavior.
Consideration of informal rules is also often critical to explaining
institutional outcomes. Informal structures shape the performance of
formal institutions in important and often unexpected ways. For
example, executive-legislative relations cannot always be explained
strictly in terms of constitutional design. Neopatrimonial norms
permitting unregulated presidential control over state institutions in
Africa and Latin America often yield a degree of executive dominance
that far exceeds a presidents' constitutional authority.26
Informal
institutions may also
limit presidential power. In
constitutional terms, Chile possesses “one of the most powerful
presidencies in the world.”
27 Yet, due to a set of
informal institutions that encouraged executive consultation and power
sharing, Chilean presidents systematically underused their
constitutional prerogatives during the 1990s;
28
consequently, Chile was cited as an exception in a region characterized
by presidential dominance.
29 Informal institutions also mediate the effects of electoral rules.
For example, Costa Rica's proportional representation system and
ban on congressional reelection offer no formal incentive for
legislators to perform constituency service. Yet Costa Rican
legislators routinely engage in such activities in response to
informal, party-sponsored “districts” and blacklisting.30
In the area of candidate selection, studies in
the United States suggest that because committed voters are more likely
to participate in primaries, primary systems encourage the election of
ideologically polarizing candidates.
31 Yet in a context of pervasive clientelism, where
primary participation is limited largely to people induced to vote by
local brokers, such elections are won not by ideological candidates but
by those with the largest political machine.
32 Informal institutions also shape formal institutional outcomes in a
less visible way: by creating or strengthening incentives to comply
with formal rules. In other words, they may do the enabling and
constraining that is widely attributed to formal institutions.33
Since the
Federalist Papers, scholars
have recognized that the norms underlying formal institutions matter.
The stability of the United States' presidential democracy is not
only a product of the rules laid out in the Constitution, but is also
rooted in informal rules (such as gracious losing, the underuse of
certain formal prerogatives, and bipartisan consensus on critical
issues) that prevent formal checks and balances from deteriorating into
severe conflict among the branches of government.
These are hardly isolated examples. Informal rules shape formal
institutional outcomes in areas such as legislative politics,34
judicial
politics,
35 party organization,
36 campaign finance,
37 regime
change,
38 federalism,
39 public administration,
40 and state
building.
41 Bringing together a large but disparate body of scholarship, we
develop a research agenda aimed at incorporating informal institutions
into the theoretical toolkits used by students of comparative
politics.42
In the first
section we clarify the concept of informal institution, distinguishing
it not only from that of formal institution, but also from other
informal phenomena, including weak institutions, informal behavioral
regularities, informal organizations, and culture. In the second
section we examine how formal and informal rules interact. Expanding on
the work of Hans-Joachim Lauth,
43 we distinguish among four
types of informal institution: complementary, accommodating, competing,
and substitutive. The third and fourth sections are devoted to issues
of informal institutional emergence and change—questions largely
ignored in recent comparative research. Finally, we discuss specific
challenges related to research on informal institutions, such as issues
of identification, measurement, and comparison.
A few caveats are in order. Although the term informal institution
encompasses a wide range of social (e.g., the handshake, or the rules
of dating) and economic (e.g., black markets) institutions, we are
concerned only with political rules of the game. We restrict
our analysis to the modern period, when codification of law is nearly
universal. Before this period, our distinction between formal and
informal rules is less meaningful. Finally, although we draw on a broad
range of cases, the examples we cite are illustrative only, not
comprehensive.
What Informal Institutions Are (and Are
Not)
The term informal institution has been applied to a dizzying array of
phenomena, including personal networks,44
clientelism,
45 corruption,
46 clans and mafias,
47 civil society,
48 traditional culture,
49 and a variety of
legislative, judicial, and bureaucratic norms. We propose a more
precise—and analytically useful—definition of informal
institution. It should capture as much of the universe of informal
rules as possible, but it must be narrow enough to distinguish informal
rules from other, noninstitutional, informal phenomena.
We begin with a standard definition of institutions as rules and
procedures (both formal and informal) that structure social interaction
by constraining and enabling actors' behavior.50
How to distinguish between formal and informal
institutions is, however, less clear. Some scholars equate informal
institutions with cultural traditions.
51 Dia 1996; Pejovich 1999. Pejovich defines informal
institutions as “traditions, customs, moral values, religious
beliefs, and all other norms of behavior that have passed the test of
time…. Thus, informal institutions are the part of a
community's heritage that we call culture” (p.
166).
Others employ a state-societal distinction, treating
state agencies and state-enforced rules as formal, and the rules and
organizations within civil society as informal.
52 Still others distinguish between informal norms,
which are self-enforcing, and formal rules, which are enforced by a
third party, often the state.
53 Each conceptualization fails to capture important informal
institutions. For example, although some informal institutions are
undoubtedly rooted in cultural traditions, many—from legislative
norms to illicit patterns of party finance—have little to do with
culture. With respect to the state-societal distinction, many
institutions within the state (from bureaucratic norms to corruption)
are also informal,54
while the rules governing many nonstate organizations
(such as corporations and political parties and corporations) are widely
considered to be formal. Finally, although the self-enforcing definition is
analytically useful, it fails to account for the fact that informal rules may
be externally enforced (for example, by clan and mafia bosses), even by
the state itself (i.e., organized state corruption).
55 We employ a fourth approach. We define informal institutions as
socially shared rules, usually unwritten, that are created,
communicated, and enforced outside of officially sanctioned
channels.56
By contrast,
formal institutions are rules and procedures that are created,
communicated, and enforced through channels widely accepted as
official. This includes state institutions (courts, legislatures,
bureaucracies) and state-enforced rules (constitutions, laws,
regulations), but also what Robert C. Ellickson calls
“organization rules,” or the official rules that govern
organizations such as corporations, political parties, and interest
groups.
57 Distinguishing between formal and informal institutions, however, is
only half the conceptual task. “Informal institution” is
often treated as a residual category, in the sense that it can be
applied to virtually any behavior that departs from, or is not
accounted for by, the written-down rules. To avoid this pitfall, we
must say more about what an informal institution is not.
Four distinctions are worth noting. First, informal institutions
should be distinguished from weak institutions. Many formal
institutions are ineffective, in that rules that exist on paper are
widely circumvented or ignored. Yet formal institutional weakness does
not necessarily imply the presence of informal institutions. It may be
that no stable or binding rules—formal or informal—exist.
For example, in his seminal article on delegative democracy, Guillermo
O'Donnell argued that in much of Latin America, the formal rules
of representative democracy are weakly institutionalized.58
In the absence of institutionalized checks on
executive power, the scope of permissible presidential behavior widened
considerably, which resulted in substantial abuse of executive
authority. In subsequent work, O'Donnell highlighted how
particularistic informal institutions, such as clientelism, undermined
the effectiveness of representative institutions.
59
O'Donnell's work points to two distinct patterns of formal
institutional weakness that should not be conflated. Clientelism and
abuses of executive authority both depart from formal rules, but
whereas the former is an informal institution, the latter is best
understood as noninstitutional behavior.
Second, informal institutions must be distinguished from other
informal behavioral regularities. Not all patterned behavior is
rule-bound or rooted in shared expectations about others'
behavior.60
Behavioral
regularities may be a product of a variety of incentives. To cite an
example offered by Daniel Brinks,
61 removing one's hat in
church is an informal institution, whereas removing one's coat in
a restaurant is simply a behavioral regularity. In the latter case,
leaving one's coat on may bring physical discomfort, but it is not
expected to trigger social disapproval or sanction. To be considered an
informal institution, a behavioral regularity must respond to an
established rule or guideline, the violation of which generates some
kind of external sanction. To take another example, public graft is
clearly informal behavior, but only some patterns of graft should be
considered institutional. Where graft is enforced from above,
62 or where it is rooted
in widely shared expectations among citizens and public officials (and
a refusal to go along risks incurring important costs),
63
corruption may indeed be an institution. By contrast, where graft is
neither externally sanctioned nor rooted in shared expectations, but is
rather a response to low public sector salaries and ineffective
enforcement, it may be best characterized as a behavior pattern.
Third, informal institutions should be distinguished from informal
organizations. Although scholars often incorporate organizations into
their definition of institution,64
it is useful,
following Douglass North, to separate the political actors (or
“players”) from the rules they follow.
65 Just as
formal organizations (such as political parties or unions) may be
distinguished from formal rules, informal organizations (clans, mafias)
should be distinguished from informal institutions. Nevertheless,
informal rules may be embedded within these organizations, and just as
formal political organizations are studied under the rubric of
“institutionalism,” clans, mafias, and other informal
structures may be usefully incorporated into informal institutional
analysis.
Finally, we return to the distinction between informal institutions
and the broader concept of culture. Culture may help to shape informal
institutions, and the frontier between the two is a critical area for
research.66
In our
view, however, the best way to pursue this agenda is to cast informal
institutions in relatively narrow terms by defining informal
institution in terms of shared expectations rather than shared values.
Shared expectations may or may not be rooted in broader societal
values.
67 Distinguishing between
shared values and shared expectations allows future scholars to analyze
potential causal relationships between culture and informal
institutions, such as whether societal values reinforce or undermine
particular informal institutions.
Four Types of Informal Institution
Formal and informal institutions interact in a variety of ways. In
this section, we develop a typology aimed at capturing these
relationships.68
Lauth
2000 distinguishes among three types of formal-informal
institutional relationships: complementary, substitutive, and
conflicting. He does not elaborate on these types, however.
Characterizations of formal-informal institutional relationships tend
to fall into one of two sharply contrasting categories. One camp treats
informal institutions as functional, or problem solving, in that they
provide solutions to problems of social interaction and
coordination,
69 which enhance the efficiency or performance of
formal institutions.
70 A second camp treats informal institutions as
dysfunctional, or problem creating. Clientelism, corruption, and
patrimonialism are said to undermine the performance of formal
democratic, market, and state institutions.
71 However,
recent studies suggest a more complex picture than envisioned by either
camp, in which informal institutions at times reinforce or substitute
for the formal institutions they appear to undermine.
To capture these differences, our typology is based on two
dimensions. The first is the degree to which formal and informal
institutional outcomes converge. The distinction here is whether
following informal rules produces a substantively similar or different
result from that expected from a strict and exclusive adherence to
formal rules. Where following the informal rule leads to a
substantively different outcome, formal and informal institutions
diverge. Where the two outcomes are not substantively different, formal
and informal institutions converge.
The second dimension is the effectiveness of the relevant formal
institutions, that is, the extent to which rules and procedures that
exist on paper are enforced and complied with in practice.72
By effectiveness, we do not mean
efficiency. History is littered with examples of inefficient
institutions that nevertheless effectively shaped actors'
expectations (North 1990).
Effective
formal institutions
actually constrain or enable political
actors' choices. Actors believe that there is a high probability
that official authorities will sanction noncompliance. Where formal
rules and procedures are ineffective, actors believe the probability of
enforcement (and hence the expected cost of violation) will be low.
These two dimensions produce the fourfold typology shown in figure 1. The types located in the upper left
(complementary) and lower right (competing) cells correspond to the
“functional” and “dysfunctional” types that
predominate in much of the literature. The typology also yields two
novel types (accommodating and substitutive) that allow us to make
sense of other, less familiar institutional patterns.
A typology of informal institutions
Complementary informal institutions
The left side of the figure corresponds to informal institutions that
coexist with effective formal institutions, such that actors expect
that the rules that exist on paper will be enforced. The upper left
corner combines effective formal rules and convergent outcomes,
producing what Lauth calls complementary informal
institutions.73
Such institutions “fill in gaps”
either by addressing contingencies not dealt with in the formal rules
or by facilitating the pursuit of individual goals within the formal
institutional framework. These informal institutions often enhance
efficiency. Examples include the myriad norms, routines, and operating
procedures that ease decision making and coordination within
bureaucracies,
74 and judicial norms (such as the opinion
assignment procedures and the “Rule of Four”) that
facilitate the work of the U.S. Supreme Court.
75 Complementary informal institutions may also serve as a foundation
for formal institutions, creating or strengthening incentives to comply
with formal rules that might otherwise exist merely on paper.76
Thus scholars have linked the effectiveness of
the U.S. Constitution to a complementary set of shared beliefs and
expectations among citizens.
77 North,
Summerhill, and Weingast, 2000.
Likewise, the efficiency of Singapore's postcolonial bureaucracy
(the formal organization of which resembled those of Indonesia and the
Philippines) has been attributed to underlying norms of meritocracy and
discipline.
78 Rural Chinese village
governments are more likely to provide public goods where there exist
informal norms of social obligation generated by membership in local
temple associations.
79 In each case, informal
institutions do not merely exist alongside effective formal ones, but
rather play a key role in making effective the formal rules of the
game.
Accommodating informal institutions
The lower left corner of figure 1, which
combines effective formal institutions and divergent outcomes,
corresponds to accommodating informal institutions. These
informal institutions create incentives to behave in ways that alter
the substantive effects of formal rules, but without directly violating
them; they contradict the spirit, but not the letter, of the formal
rules. Accommodating informal institutions are often created by actors
who dislike outcomes generated by the formal rules but are unable to
change or openly violate those rules. As such, they often help to
reconcile these actors' interests with the existing formal
institutional arrangements. Hence, although accommodating informal
institutions may not be efficiency enhancing, they may enhance the
stability of formal institutions by dampening demands for change.
Chile's executive-legislative power-sharing mechanisms are a
clear example. Leaders of the Democratic Concertation inherited an
“exaggeratedly strong presidential system” and a
majoritarian electoral system that ran counter to their goal of
maintaining a broad multiparty coalition.80
Lacking the legislative strength to amend the
1980 Constitution, Concertación elites created informal
mechanisms of interparty and executive-legislative consultation aimed
at counteracting its effects. These power-sharing arrangements
“enhanced coalitional trust” in a formal constitutional
setting that otherwise “provided very few incentives for
cooperation.”
81 Dutch consociational practices may also be characterized as
accommodating. The Netherlands' post-1917 democracy was based on a
set of “informal, unwritten rules” of elite accommodation
and power sharing, including extensive consultation in policy making,
mutual veto power, and the proportional allocation of government jobs
among political parties.82
Although
these cartel-like arrangements violated the democratic spirit of the
Dutch constitution (by limiting the power of the vote), they reduced
class and religious conflict, thereby enhancing democratic
stability.
83 Accommodating informal rules also emerged within state socialist
institutions in the Soviet Union. Because strict adherence to the
formal rules governing Soviet political and economic life did not allow
enterprises to fulfill state targets or permit individuals to meet
basic needs, a set of informal norms—commonly known as
blat—emerged in which individuals met these goals
through personal networks.84
Not strictly illegal,
blat enabled
factory managers, workers, and bureaucrats to “find a way around
formal procedures.”
85 By helping
enterprises to fulfill state targets and individuals to obtain
essential goods and services, this informal system of exchange was
critical to the survival of the Soviet system.
86Competing informal institutions
On the right side of figure 1 we find
informal institutions that coexist with ineffective formal
institutions. In such cases, formal rules and procedures are not
systematically enforced, which enables actors to ignore or violate
them. The cell in the lower right corner combines ineffective formal
rules and divergent outcomes, producing competing informal
institutions. These informal institutions structure incentives in ways
that are incompatible with the formal rules: to follow one rule, actors
must violate another. Particularistic informal institutions such as
clientelism, patrimonialism, clan politics, and corruption are among
the most familiar examples.87
O'Donnell 1996; Böröcz 2000; Lauth
2000; Collins 2002a, 2003; Lindberg 2003.
According to O'Donnell (1996, 40),
particularistic norms are “antagonistic to one of the main
aspects of the full institutional package of polyarchy….
Individuals performing roles in political and state institutions are
supposed to be guided not by particularistic motives but by
universalistic orientations to some version of the public good….
Where particularism is pervasive, this notion is weaker, less widely
held, and seldom enforced.”
Thus postwar Italian
corruption was embedded in “alternative norms” under which
actors could violate certain state laws “with
impunity,”
88
whereas those who adhered to the law “met with certain
punishment.”
89 Competing informal institutions are often found in postcolonial
contexts in which formal institutions were imposed on indigenous rules
and authority structures. In postcolonial Ghana, civil servants were
officially instructed to follow the rules of the public bureaucracy,
but as Robert Price found, most believed they would pay a significant
social cost (such as a loss of standing in the community) if they
ignored kinship group norms that obliged them to provide jobs and other
favors to their families and villages.90
Similarly,
scholars of legal pluralism have argued that the imposition of European
legal systems created “multiple systems of legal
obligation.”
91 Because
these systems “embodied very different principles and
procedures,”
92 adherence to custom law
at times required a violation of state law (and vice versa).
Substitutive informal institutions
Finally, the upper right corner, which combines ineffective formal
institutions and compatible outcomes, corresponds to
substitutive informal institutions.93
Like
complementary institutions, substitutive informal institutions are
employed by actors who seek outcomes compatible with formal rules and
procedures. Like competing institutions, however, they exist in
environments where formal rules are not routinely enforced. Hence,
substitutive informal institutions achieve what formal institutions
were designed, but failed, to achieve.
Substitutive institutions tend to emerge where state structures are
weak or lack authority. During Mexico's protracted democratic
transition, formal institutions of electoral dispute resolution (such
as the electoral courts) lacked credibility and were frequently
bypassed. In this context, officials of the national government and the
opposition National Action Party resolved postelection disputes through
informal concertacesiones, or “gentleman's
agreements.”94
Concertacesiones thus served as a
“way station” for government and opposition elites until
formal institutions of electoral dispute resolution became
credible.
95 In rural northern Peru, where state weakness
resulted in inadequate police protection and ineffective courts during
the late 1970s, citizens created informal
rondas campesinas
(self-defense patrols) to defend their communities and
ronda
assemblies (informal courts) to resolve local disputes.
96 In rural China, some local officials compensate
for the state's incapacity to raise revenue and provide public
goods by mobilizing resources through temple and lineage associations,
thereby “substituting the use of these informal institutions for
… formal political institutional channels of public goods
provisions.”
97 Taken together, these four types suggest that informal institutions
cannot be classified in simple dichotomous (functional versus
dysfunctional) terms. Although substitutive informal institutions such
as concertacesiones and rondas campesinas subvert
formal rules and procedures, they may help achieve results (resolution
of postelectoral conflict, public security) that the formal rules
failed to achieve. And although accommodating informal institutions
such as consociationalism violate the spirit of the formal rules, they
may generate outcomes (democratic stability) that are viewed as broadly
beneficial. It remains an open question, however, whether accommodating
and substitutive institutions can contribute to the development of more
effective formal structures, or whether they “crowd
out” such development (by quelling demands for formal
institutional change or creating new actors, skills, and interests
linked to the preservation of the informal rules).98
The following two sections lay
a foundation for addressing such questions.
Origins of Informal Institutions
To date, much empirical literature on informal institutions has
neglected questions of why and how such institutions emerge.99
Analyses of entrenched competing informal
institutions such as custom law, clientelism, and patrimonialism
frequently take them as historical givens, or part of a static cultural
landscape, rarely asking why they emerged in the first place. As a
result, they often understate the degree to which informal institutions
are modified, adapted, or even reinvented over time.
100 For example, some indigenous institutions
widely viewed as “traditional” are in fact recent creations
that merely draw on earlier traditions. See Starn
1999; Van Cott 2000, 2003; Galvan
2004.
Meanwhile, many existing explanations
(particularly studies of complementary institutions) confront a major
pitfall of early functionalist accounts of formal institutions: they
explain the emergence of informal institutions primarily in terms of
their purported effects (e.g., the efficiency gains they yield),
without identifying the mechanisms by which they are created.
101 For example, many early
rational-choice analyses treated informal norms as efficient solutions
to problems of cycling, information, or collective action.
102 Although such
explanations may partially explain the persistence of informal
institutions once established, they are insufficient, if not
misleading, for generating theories about institutional emergence. In
this section we seek to move beyond static and functionalist accounts,
arguing that compelling explanations of informal institutions must not
only ask why actors create informal rules, but also examine how actors
create and communicate those rules.
Why Informal Institutions?
We focus our discussion here on informal institutions that are
endogenous to formal institutional structures.103
Many informal institutions emerge endogenously from
formal institutional arrangements. Actors create them in an effort to
subvert, mitigate the effects of, substitute for, or enhance the
efficiency of formal institutions. However, other informal institutions
develop independently of formal institutional structures, in response
to conditions that are unrelated to (and frequently pre-date) the
formal institutional context. Formal institutions may then be built on
the foundation of these informal institutions (actors may formalize
pre-existing informal rules or use them as the bases for designing
formal ones), or they may be created without taking pre-existing
informal structures into account (as occurred with many colonial
institutions).
In other words, why, given the existence of a
set of formal rules and rule-making mechanisms, do actors choose to
create informal rules? Building on the previous section, we see three
general motivations.
First, actors create informal rules because formal institutions are
incomplete.104
Formal rules set general
parameters for behavior, but they cannot cover all contingencies.
Consequently, actors operating within a particular formal institutional
context, such as bureaucracies and legislatures, develop norms and
procedures that expedite their work or address problems not anticipated
by formal rules.
105 Second, informal institutions may be a “second best”
strategy for actors who prefer, but cannot achieve, a formal
institutional solution.106
We thank
Susan Stokes for suggesting this point.
In some cases, actors
simply lack the power to change the formal rules. Thus post-Pinochet
elites in Chile created informal power-sharing arrangements because
they lacked the political strength to rewrite the 1980
Constitution.
107 Similarly, Soviet workers
and managers opted for the informality of
blat in part because
they were unable to reform or do away with state socialist
institutions.
A broader statement of this motivation, elaborated by Carol Mershon,
is that actors create informal institutions when they deem it less
costly than creating formal institutions to their liking.108
In postwar Italy, Christian Democratic leaders
who sought to keep the communist and neofascist parties out of power
found it easier to develop an informal “formula” to exclude
those parties from governing coalitions than to push through parliament
a majoritarian electoral system aimed at strengthening large moderate
parties.
109 Similarly,
Costa Rican party leaders' use of informal devices to induce
legislators to engage in constituency service may have been easier than
overturning the ban on legislative reelection.
110 Inventing informal institutions may also be a second-best strategy
where formal institutions exist on paper but are ineffective in
practice. In the case of substitutive informal institutions, for
example, actors create informal structures not because they dislike the
formal rules, but because the existing rules—and rule-making
processes—lack credibility. Thus Mexican opposition leaders
engaged in concertacesiones during the 1990s because they did
not view the formal electoral courts as credible, and Peruvian
villagers created rondas campesinas because the state judicial
system failed to enforce the rule of law.
A third motivation for creating informal institutions is the pursuit
of goals not considered publicly acceptable. Because they are
relatively inconspicuous,111
informal institutions
allow actors to pursue activities—ranging from the unpopular to
the illegal—that are unlikely to stand the test of public
scrutiny. Even where bribery, patrimonialism, and vote-buying are
widely accepted, prevailing norms of universalism prevent their
legalization. Norms of lax enforcement—what the Dutch call
gedogen—provide another example.
112
Prostitution, soft drug use, and euthanasia (or abortion in
predominantly Catholic countries) are legally proscribed but widely
tolerated. The informal procedures enabling extrajudicial executions in
Brazil may also be explained in these terms.
113 Informal institutions may also be created in pursuit of goals that
are not internationally acceptable. For example, the
geopolitical changes produced by the end of the Cold War raised the
external cost of maintaining openly (e.g., military or Leninist one
party) authoritarian regimes during the 1990s, which led many
autocratic elites to adopt formal democratic institutions. To maintain
power in this new international context, autocrats in countries like
Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Peru, Russia, Ukraine, and Zimbabwe
resorted to informal mechanisms of coercion and control, ranging from
use of paramilitary thugs to elaborate systems of vote buying, fraud,
co-optation, espionage, and blackmail.114
Understanding why actors create informal institutions is not,
however, sufficient to explain how they are established. Incompleteness
does not by itself explain how the need for additional rules translates
into their creation (or, for that matter, why informal, rather than
formal, rules are adopted). Where informal institutions are a
second-best strategy, why are actors who lack the capacity to change
the formal rules nevertheless able to establish and enforce informal
ones? And where actors share certain illicit goals, how are they able
to establish mechanisms that effectively circumvent the formal rules?
In short, to avoid the functionalist trap, it is essential to examine
the mechanisms by which informal institutions are established.
How Informal Institutions are Created and
Communicated
The construction of informal institutions differs markedly from
formal rule-making processes. Whereas formal rules are created through
official channels (such as executives and legislatures) and
communicated and enforced by state agencies (such as the police and
courts), informal rules are created, communicated, and enforced outside
of public channels, and usually outside of the public eye. The actors
who create and enforce them may deny having done so. Hence, their
origins are often unclear.115
See, for
example, Starn's account of the disputed origins of the ronda
campesinas in Peru (1999, 36–69) and
Ledeneva's (1998) analysis of the origins
of blat in the Soviet Union.
Precisely because of these differences, scholars should take the
process of informal rule-making seriously by identifying the actors,
coalitions, and interests behind the creation of informal rules. To the
extent that these rules are created in a context in which power and
resources are unevenly distributed, they can be expected to produce
winners and losers.116
Thus, following Jack
Knight,
117 scholars
should be sensitive to underlying processes of conflict and coercion,
rather than assume pure coordination.
Processes of informal institutional emergence vary. In some cases,
the process is “top down”; informal institutions may be a
product of elite design and imposition (the Mexican dedazo,
Dutch consociationalism), or they may emerge out of elite-level
strategic interaction (Mexico's concertacesiones). In
other instances (corruption, clientelism, blat) informal rules
emerge out of a decentralized process involving a much larger number of
actors. In either process, we may understand mechanisms of emergence in
terms of focal points,118
repeated interaction,
119 or bargaining.
120
Alternatively, informal institutional creation may be a historically
contingent process in which informal structures are an unintended
product of particular conflicts and compromises. For example,
Amakudari originated as a makeshift strategy by Japanese
ministry officials seeking to reconcile prewar norms of lifetime
employment with postwar realities of resource scarcity and strict
seniority systems.
121 Although such informal
institutions may ultimately take on functions that are perceived as
efficient or beneficial, these functions often have little to do with
their origins.
Analyses of the origins of informal institutions must also account
for how they are communicated and learned in the absence of written
down rules and public enforcement. In some cases, informal
institutionalization appears to be a process of social learning through
widely observed instances of trial and error. The Mexican
dedazo was institutionalized through a “process of
learning by example,” as PRI leaders who broke the informal rules
during the 1940s and 1950s suffered political defeat and
marginalization, while those who played by the rules “were
rewarded with better posts.”122
Similarly, postwar Italian prime ministers who
broke the informal rule that gave parties the right to name government
ministers “saw their governments meet rapid ends.” Their
successors quickly “learned the lesson,” and by the
mid-1950s, “the rule of negotiated decisions by party and faction
leaders had been hammered out.”
123 Social networks and political organizations may also transmit
informal rules. Thus the norms of Amakudari were diffused
through social networks that linked universities, state bureaucracies,
and private corporations,124
and informal
networks within the Peruvian and Ukrainian states communicated the
rules of corruption and blackmail that sustained autocratic regimes
during the 1990s.
125 Political parties also carry informal rules.
Parties communicated power-sharing arrangements in Chile, the
Netherlands, and postwar Italy;
126 party
organizations enforced the system of kickbacks and bribery in
Italy;
127 and competing local
party leaders spread
rondas campesinas across northern
Peru.
128 In sum, moving beyond functionalist accounts entails identifying the
relevant actors and interests behind informal institutions, specifying
the process by which informal rules are created, and showing how those
rules are communicated to other actors in such a manner that they
evolve into sets of shared expectations.
Informal Institutional Change
Informal institutions are often characterized as highly resistant to
change, possessing a “tenacious survival ability.”129
When
change occurs, it is expected to be slow and incremental.
130 Lauth, for example,
argues that because informal rules “do not possess a center which
directs and co-ordinates their actions,” informal institutional
change is likely to be an “extremely lengthy” process.
131 Yet informal institutions
do
change—and often quite quickly. The centuries-old Chinese
practice of foot-binding disappeared within a generation,
132 and many of the informal rules that structured
Mexican elite politics for much of the twentieth century (including the
dedazo) collapsed quickly during the late 1990s.
133 Several sources may generate the impetus for informal institutional
change. One important source is formal institutional change.
The impact of formal rule changes should not, of course, be overstated;
many informal institutions have proved resilient even in the face of
large-scale legal or administrative reform.134
Nevertheless, to the
extent that formal institutional change alters the costs and benefits
of adhering to particular informal rules, it can serve as an important
catalyst for informal institutional change.
Two types of formal institutional change are relevant here. The first
is change in formal institutional design. Particularly for informal
institutions that are endogenous to formal structures, a change in the
design of the formal rules may affect the costs and benefits of
adhering to related informal rules, which can produce rapid informal
institutional change. In the case of complementary informal
institutions, for example, modifying the relevant formal rules may
change the nature of the gaps that the informal institution had been
designed to address, which may create incentives for actors to modify
or abandon the informal rule. The 1974 Bill of Rights of Subcommittees
in the House of Representatives “produced a sharp change in
formal rules that overrode previous informal committee
structures.”135
Informal institutional change may also be a product of changes in
formal institutional strength or effectiveness. In such cases, changes
in the level of enforcement of formal rules alter the costs and
benefits adhering to informal institutions that compete with or
substitute for those rules. For example, compliance with competing
informal institutions becomes more costly with increased enforcement of
the formal rules, and at some point, these costs will induce actors to
abandon the informal institution. Thus the increased judicial
enforcement triggered by the Mani Pulite investigations
weakened corruption networks in Italy;136
the tight controls imposed by the
postrevolutionary state weakened traditional gift-giving norms in
Maoist China;
137 and federal enforcement of civil rights
legislation weakened Jim Crow practices in the South.
Increased formal institutional effectiveness may also weaken
substitutive informal institutions. When the credibility of previously
ineffective formal structures is enhanced, the benefits associated with
the use of substitutive institutions may diminish, potentially to the
point of their dispensability. For example, the increased
credibility of Mexico's electoral courts over the course of the
1990s reduced the incentive of opposition leaders to work through
informal concertacesiones,138
and
the increased effectiveness of Peru's public security and judicial
systems led to the collapse of many
rondas campesinas and
ronda assemblies.
139 Other sources of informal institutional change lie outside the formal
institutional context. For scholars who view informal institutions
primarily as a product of culture, informal institutional change is
rooted primarily in the evolution of societal values.140
Because such shifts tend to be glacial in pace,
this pattern of informal institutional change will be slow and
incremental. We might understand the erosion of traditional or
kinship-based patterns of authority in Europe in these terms.
Informal institutions may also change as the status quo conditions
that sustain them change.141
Developments in the external
environment may change the distribution of power and resources within a
community, weakening those actors who benefit from a particular
informal institution and strengthening those who seek to change it.
Thus Mexico's increasingly competitive electoral environment
during the 1990s strengthened local PRI leaders and activists
vis-à-vis the national leadership, which allowed them to contest
and eventually dismantle the
dedazo system.
142 In the Netherlands, a long-term decline in class
and religious identities strengthened new parties that challenged the
consociational rules of the game and induced established parties to
abandon them.
143 The growth of middle-class
electorates erodes the bases of clientelism by reducing voters'
dependence on the distribution of selective material goods.
144 In these cases, informal institutional change
tends to be incremental, as actors gradually reorient their
expectations to reflect underlying changes in their and others'
bargaining power.
Other analytic tools may be needed to explain some rapid informal
institutional change or collapse. Tipping models offer one such
tool.145
These models suggest that if a sufficiently large enough number of
actors become convinced that a new and better alternative exists, and
if a mechanism exists through which to coordinate actors'
expectations, a shift from one set of norms to another may occur quite
rapidly. Gerry Mackie argues that the move to end foot binding in China
hinged on creating an alternative marriage market that allowed sons to
marry daughters who had natural feet, thereby escaping conventional
inferiority.
146 Figure 2 summarizes these sources of
informal institutional change. As the figure suggests, informal
institutions vary considerably with respect to both the source and the
pace of change. Whereas some (complementary, accommodating) are highly
susceptible to changes in formal institutional design, others
(substitutive, competing) are more likely to be affected by changes in
formal institutional strength. With respect to the pace of change,
cultural evolution is likely to produce incremental change, but formal
institutional change or coordination around an alternative equilibrium
may trigger the rapid collapse of informal institutions.
Sources of informal institutional change
Research Challenges: Identification,
Measurement, and Comparison
Bringing informal institutions into mainstream comparative
institutional analysis poses a new set of research challenges. A major
issue is identifying and measuring informal institutions. In formal
institutional analysis, this task is relatively straightforward.
Because formal institutions are usually written down and officially
communicated and sanctioned, their identification and measurement often
requires little knowledge of particular cases, which facilitates
large-n comparison. Identifying informal institutions is more
challenging. A country's constitution can tell us whether it has a
presidential or parliamentary system of government, but it cannot tell
us about the pervasiveness of clientelism or kinship networks.
One way of identifying informal institutions is to look for instances
in which similar formal rules produce different outcomes and then
attribute the difference to informal institutions.147
Although the logic of this approach is clear, it
reduces informal institutions to a residual category and risks
conflating informal institutions and weak institutions. An alternative
strategy is to identify stable patterns of behavior that do not
correspond to formal rules. However, this approach runs the risk of
treating all behavioral regularities as informal institutions.
At a minimum, efforts to identify informal institutions should answer
three basic questions.148
For a more
elaborate discussion of how to identify and measure informal
institutions, see Brinks 2003b.
First, what are the actors' shared expectations about the actual
constraints they face? Only by examining actors' mutual
understanding of the rules can one distinguish between informal
behavior patterns and informal institutions. Second, what is the
community to which the informal rules apply? Whereas the domain of a
formal institution is often delineated by laws or other statutes, the
domain of informal rules is often more difficult to discern. The
relevant community may be a village, a nation, an ethnic or religious
group, or an organization such as a political party, legislature, or
state bureaucracy. In some cases, the relevant community is a political
elite, the boundaries of which are often blurry. Third, how are
informal rules enforced? If informal behavior is rule-bound, then
violations must trigger external sanction. Unlike formal enforcement
mechanisms (police, courts), informal sanctioning mechanisms are often
subtle, hidden, and even illegal. They may range from hostile remarks,
gossip, ostracism, and other displays of social disapproval to
extrajudicial violence.
149 An additional
problem, identified by Brinks (2003b), is
that some informal rules permit, but do not require, certain behavior.
Under rules of this type, actors who refrain from the permitted
behavior (e.g., government officials who choose not to collect bribes)
do not break the informal rule and thus will not be sanctioned. In such
cases, sanctions are likely to be applied only to actors who seek to
formally sanction behavior permitted by the informal rules—i.e.,
whistle blowers.
Identifying the shared expectations and enforcement mechanisms that
sustain informal institutions is a challenging task, requiring in most
cases substantial knowledge of the community within which the informal
institutions are embedded. Hence there is probably no substitute for
intensive fieldwork in informal institutional analysis. Indeed most
studies of informal institutions take the form of either abstract
theory (N=0) or inductive case studies (N=1).150
Within the case study tradition, a more microlevel
approach is to construct analytic narratives that blend elements of
deductive and inductive reasoning. See Bates et al.
1998.
Case studies provide essential building blocks
for comparison and theory building. However, a more general body of
theory will require scholars to incorporate other methods as well.
One such method is rigorous small-n comparison. Without losing the
sensitivity to context that characterizes case studies, small-n
analyses can begin to identify patterns of informal institutional
effects, formal-informal institutional interaction, and informal
institutional change. For example, Kathleen Collins's comparative
study of three Central Asian states enabled her to examine the
interaction between clan networks and different formal regime
types.151
Similarly, Scott Desposato's analysis of
legislative behavior in five Brazilian states with varying degrees of
clientelism allowed him to consider how clientelism affects the
functioning of legislatures with similar formal structures.
152 Large-n surveys may also prove useful in research on informal
institutions. Survey research may capture actors' expectations and
beliefs about the “actual” rules of the game. Here it is
important to distinguish between conventional surveys that capture
values or attitudes toward particular institutions (e.g., the World
Values Survey) and those designed to capture socially shared beliefs
about constraints that individuals face. An example of the latter is
Susan Stokes's analysis of informal institutions of accountability
in Argentina, which uses survey data to demonstrate the existence in
some parts of the country of shared citizen expectations that voters
will punish politicians who behave dishonestly.153
Although
expectations-based surveys may initially be limited to identifying of
informal institutions, they might eventually be used to generate and
test causal claims.
Conclusion
Since James March and Johan P. Olsen declared that “a new
institutionalism has appeared in political science,”154
research on political institutions has
advanced considerably. Yet because the comparative politics literature
has focused primarily on formal institutions, it risks missing many of
the “real” incentives and constraints that underlie
political behavior. Indeed, rational-choice analyses of institutions
have been criticized for an “excessive attention to formal
rules” and “insufficient attention to firmly established
informal practices and ‘institutions.’”
155 We have sought to provide a framework for incorporating informal
rules into mainstream institutional analysis. Far from rejecting the
literature on institutions, we seek to broaden and extend it, with the
goal of refining, and ultimately strengthening, its theoretical
framework. We see several areas for future research. First, we must
posit and test hypotheses about how informal rules shape formal
institutional outcomes. For example, how do clientelism and patronage
networks mediate the effects of electoral and legislative rules?156
In comparative politics, the issue of how
informal institutions sustain or reinforce—as opposed to
undermine or distort—formal ones has not been well researched.
When institutions function effectively, we often assume that the formal
rules are driving actors' behavior. Yet in some cases, underlying
informal norms do much of the enabling and constraining that we
attribute to the formal rules.
Second, we need to theorize more rigorously about the emergence of
informal institutions and particularly about the mechanisms through
which informal rules are created, communicated, and learned. Some
seemingly age-old informal institutions are in reality relatively
recent reconfigurations (or reinventions); this fact makes the issues
of origins all the more compelling.157
Third, we need to better understand the sources of informal
institutional stability and change. One question not addressed in this
article is that of codification of informal rules. In some instances,
state actors opt to legalize informal institutions that are perceived
to compete with or undermine formal rules. Several Latin American
governments “constitutionalized” aspects of indigenous law
(granting them constitutional status) during the 1990s in an effort to
enhance compliance with state law.158
Similarly, in Argentina, in an
effort to regulate President Carlos Menem's use of
extraconstitutional decree authority, legislators included a provision
for executive decrees in the 1994 Constitution.
159 We need to know more about what
induces state actors to formalize rather than oppose informal
institutions.
Comparative politics research on informal institutions is still at an
incipient stage. Advances are likely on several fronts, ranging from
abstract formal modeling to ethnographic studies to survey research.
New insights will come from a variety of disciplines, including
anthropology, economics, law, sociology, and political psychology.
Hence, it is essential to promote a broad and pluralistic research
agenda that encourages fertilization across disciplines, methods, and
regions. Given the range of areas in which informal rules and
organizations matter politically, it is essential that political
scientists take the real rules of the game seriously—whether they
are written into parchment or not.
