Hostname: page-component-6766d58669-h8lrw Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-05-21T16:38:11.813Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Informal Institutions and Comparative Politics: A Research Agenda

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2004

Gretchen Helmke  and
Steven Levitsky
Gretchen Helmke
Affiliation:
Gretchen Helmke is assistant professor of political science at the University of Rochester (hlmk@mail.rochester.edu)
Steven Levitsky
Affiliation:
Steven Levitsky is associate professor of government at Harvard University (levitsky@wcfia.harvard.edu)
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Mainstream comparative research on political institutions focuses primarily on formal rules. Yet in many contexts, informal institutions, ranging from bureaucratic and legislative norms to clientelism and patrimonialism, shape even more strongly political behavior and outcomes. Scholars who fail to consider these informal rules of the game risk missing many of the most important incentives and constraints that underlie political behavior. In this article we develop a framework for studying informal institutions and integrating them into comparative institutional analysis. The framework is based on a typology of four patterns of formal-informal institutional interaction: complementary, accommodating, competing, and substitutive. We then explore two issues largely ignored in the literature on this subject: the reasons and mechanisms behind the emergence of informal institutions, and the nature of their stability and change. Finally, we consider challenges in research on informal institutions, including issues of identification, measurement, and comparison.Gretchen Helmke's book Courts Under Constraints: Judges, Generals, and Presidents in Argentina, will be published by Cambridge University Press. Steven Levitsky is the author of Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective and is currently writing a book on competitive authoritarian regimes in the post–Cold War era. The authors thank the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University and the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame for generously sponsoring conferences on informal institutions. The authors also gratefully acknowledge comments from Jorge Domínguez, Anna Grzymala-Busse, Dennis Galvan, Goran Hyden, Jack Knight, Lisa Martin, Hillel Soifer, Benjamin Smith, Susan Stokes, María Victoria Murillo, and Kurt Weyland, as well as three anonymous reviewers and the editors of Perspectives on Politics.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 2 , Issue 4 , December 2004 , pp. 725 - 740
Copyright
© 2004 American Political Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

REFERENCES

Axelrod, Robert. 1986. An evolutionary approach to norms.” American Political Science Review 80 (4): 1095–1111.Google Scholar
Bates, Robert H., Avner Greif, Margaret Levi, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, and Barry R. Weingast. 1998. Analytic narratives. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Bauer, Raymond A, Alex Inkeles, and Clyde Kluckhohn. 1956. How the Soviet system works: Cultural, psychological, and social themes. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Berliner, Joseph S. 1957. Factory and manger in the USSR. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Bill Chavez, Rebecca. 2004. The rule of law in nascent democracies: Judicial politics in Argentina. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Böröcz, Jószef. 2000. Informality Rules. East European Politics and Societies 14 (2): 348–80.Google Scholar
Boussard, Caroline. 2000. Democratic consolidation: The role of informal institutions. Illustrations from Central America. Paper presented at the 22nd International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, Miami, FL, March 16–18.
Brinks, Daniel. 2003a. Informal institutions and the rule of law: The judicial response to state killings in Buenos Aires and São Paulo in the 1990s. Comparative Politics 36 (1): 1–19.Google Scholar
Brinks, Daniel 2003b. Courts, norms, and laws: Competing rules and legal rights in Salvador, São Paulo, and Buenos Aires. Paper presented at the conference Informal Institutions and Politics in Latin America, Kellogg Institute for International Studies, University of Notre Dame, April 24–25.
Calvert, Randall. 1995. The rational choice theory of social institutions: Cooperation, coordination, and communication.” In Modern political economy: Old topics, new directions, ed. Jeffrey S. Banks and Eric A. Hanushek, 216–67. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Carey, John M. 2000. Parchment, equilibria, and institutions. Comparative Political Studies 33 (6): 735–61.Google Scholar
Clarke, Simon, ed. 1995. Management and industry in Russia: Formal and informal relations in the period of transition. Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar.
Colignon, Richard A, and Chikako Usui. 2003. Amakudari: The hidden fabric of Japan's economy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Collins, Kathleen. 2002a. Clans, pacts and politics in Central Asia.” Journal of Democracy 13 (3): 137–52.Google Scholar
Collins, Kathleen 2002b. Clans, pacts, and regime transitions in Central Asia. Paper presented at the conference Informal Institutions and Politics in the Developing World, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, April 5–6.
Collins, Kathleen 2003. The political role of clans in Central Asia. Comparative Politics 35 (2): 171–90.Google Scholar
Darden, Keith. 2002. Graft and governance: Corruption as an informal mechanism of state control. Paper presented at the conference Informal Institutions and Politics in the Developing World, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, April 5–6.
Della Porta, Donatella, and Alberto Vannucci. 1999. Corrupt exchanges: Actors, resources, and mechanisms of political corruption. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
Desposato, Scott W. 2003. How informal electoral institutions shape the legislative arena. Paper presented at the conference Informal Institutions and Politics in Latin America, Kellogg Institute for International Studies, University of Notre Dame, April 24–25.
Dia, Mamadou. 1996. Africa's management in the 1990s and beyond: Reconciling indigenous and transplanted institutions. Washington: World Bank.
Easter, Gerald M. 2000. Reconstructing the state: Personal networks and elite identity in Soviet Russia. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Eisenstadt, Todd. 2002. Trust but verify: How Mexico's opposition forced electoral dispute resolution from bargaining tables to courtrooms and lived to tell about it. Paper presented at the conference Informal Institutions and Politics in the Developing World, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, April 5–6.
Eisenstadt, Todd 2003. Thinking outside the (ballot) box: Informal electoral institutions and Mexico's political opening, Latin American Politics and Society 45 (1): 25–54.Google Scholar
Ellickson, Robert C. 1991. Order without law: How neighbors settle disputes. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Elster, Jon. 1989. The cement of society: A survey of social order. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Epstein, Lee, and Jack Knight. 1997. The choices justices make. Washington DC: Congressional Quarterly Press.
Ferreira Rubio, Delia, and Matteo Goretti. 1998. When the president governs alone: The Decretazo in Argentina, 1989–93. In Executive decree authority, ed. John M. Carey and Mathew Soberg Shugart, 33–61. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Freidenberg, Flavia, and Steven Levitsky. 2002. Organizaciónes Partidistas e Institucionalización Informal en America Latina. Paper presented at the Latin American Congress of Political Science, University of Salamanca, July 9–11.
Galvan, Dennis C. 2004. The state must be our master of fire: How peasants craft culturally sustainable development in Senegal. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Gel'man, Vladimir. 2003. Post-Soviet transitions and democratization: Toward theory building. Democratization 10 (2): 87–104.Google Scholar
Göbel, Christian. 2001. Towards a consolidated democracy? Informal and formal institutions in Taiwan's political process. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, August 30–September 2.
Griffiths, John. 1986. What is legal pluralism? Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law 24 (1): 1–56.Google Scholar
Grzymala-Busse, Anna, and Pauline Jones Luong. 2002. Reconceptualizing the state: Lessons from post-communism. Politics and Society 30 (4): 529–54.Google Scholar
Hamilton-Hart, Natasha. 2000. The Singapore state revisited. Pacific Review 13 (2): 195–216.Google Scholar
Hart, H. L. A. 1961. The concept of law. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hartlyn, Jonathan. 1994. Crisis-ridden elections (again) in the Dominican Republic: Neopatrimonialism, presidentialism, and weak electoral oversight. Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 36 (4): 91–144.Google Scholar
Helmke, Gretchen. 2002. The logic of strategic defection: Court-executive relations in Argentina under dictatorship and democracy. American Political Science Review 96 (2): 291–304.Google Scholar
Hooker, M. B. 1975. Legal pluralism: An introduction to colonial and neo-colonial laws. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Huntington, Samuel P. 1968. Political order in changing societies. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Hyden, Goran. 1980. Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania: Underdevelopment and an uncaptured peasantry. London: Heinemann.
Hyden, Goran. 2002. Why Africa finds it so hard to develop? Reflections on political representation and accountability. Paper presented at the conference Cultural and Political Foundations of Socio-Economic Development in Africa and Asia, Monte Verità, Switzerland, October 6–11.
Johnson, Chalmers. 1974. The reemployment of retired government bureaucrats in Japanese big business.” Asian Survey 14 (11): 953–65.Google Scholar
Johnson, Chalmers 1982. MITI and the Japanese miracle: The growth of industrial policy, 1925–1975. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Johnson, James. 2002. Opening questions. Paper presented at the conference Informal Institutions and Politics in the Developing World, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, April 5–6, 2002.
Katzenstein, Peter J. 1996. Cultural norms and national security: Police and military in postwar Japan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Kitschelt, Herbert. 2000. Linkages between citizens and politicians in democratic politics. Comparative Political Studies 33 (6–7): 845–79.Google Scholar
Knight, Jack. 1992. Institutions and social conflict. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Langston, Joy. 2003. The formal bases of informal power: Mexico. Paper presented at the conference Informal Institutions and Politics in Latin America, Kellogg Institute for International Studies, University of Notre Dame, April 24–25.
Lauth, Hans-Joachim. 2000. Informal institutions and democracy. Democratization 7 (4): 21–50.Google Scholar
Ledeneva, Alena V. 1998. Russia's economy of favours: Blat, networking and informal exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lemarchand, Rene. 1972. Political clientelism and ethnicity in tropical Africa: Competing solidarities in nation-building. American Political Science Review 66 (1): 68–90.Google Scholar
Levitsky, Steven. 2001. An “organized disorganization”: Informal organization and the persistence of local party structures in Argentine Peronism. Journal of Latin American Studies 33 (1): 29–68.Google Scholar
Levitsky, Steven 2003. Transforming labor-based parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in comparative perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan A. Way. 2002. The rise of competitive authoritarianism. Journal of Democracy 13 (2): 51–65.Google Scholar
Lijphart, Arend. 1975. The politics of accommodation: Pluralism and democracy in the Netherlands. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Lindberg, Steffan I. 2003. It's our time to chop: Do elections in Africa feed net-patrimonialism rather than counteract it? Democratization 10 (2): 121–40.Google Scholar
Mackie, Gerry. 1996. Ending footbinding and infibulation: A convention account. American Sociological Review 61 (6): 999–1017.Google Scholar
Maltzman, Forrest, and Paul J. Wahlbeck. 1996. May it please the chief? Opinion assignment in the Rehnquist Court. American Journal of Political Science. 40 (2): 421–43.Google Scholar
Manion, Melanie. 1996. Corruption by design: Bribery in Chinese enterprise licensing. Journal of Law, Economics, and Organizations. 12 (1): 167–95.Google Scholar
Manor, James. 2001. Center-state relations. In The success of India's democracy, ed. Atul Kohli, 78–102. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
March, James, and Johan Olsen. 1984. The new institutionalism: Organizational factors in political life. American Political Science Review 78 (3): 734–49.Google Scholar
March, James G., and Johan P. Olsen. 1989. Rediscovering institutions: The organizational basis of politics. New York: Free Press.
Matthews, Donald R. 1959. The folkways of the United States Senate: Conformity to group norms and legislative effectiveness. American Political Science Review 53 (4): 1064–89.Google Scholar
Merry, Sally Engle. 1988. Legal pluralism. Law and Society Review 22 (5): 869–96.Google Scholar
Mershon, Carol A. 1994. Expectations and informal rules in coalition formation. Comparative Political Studies 27 (1): 40–79.Google Scholar
Moreno Ocampo, Luis. 2002. Corruption and democracy: The Peruvian case of Montesinos. ReVista (Fall): 26–29.Google Scholar
Nelson, Richard R., and Sidney G. Winter. 1982. An evolutionary theory of economic change. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
North, Douglass C. 1990. Institutions, institutional change, and economic performance. New York: Cambridge University Press.
North, Douglas C., William Summerhill, and Barry R. Weingast. 2000. Order, disorder, and economic change: Latin America versus North America. In Governing for prosperity, ed. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Hilton L. Root, 17–58. New Haven: Yale University Press.
O'Donnell, Guillermo. 1994. Delegative democracy. Journal of Democracy 5 (1): 55–69.Google Scholar
O'Donnell, Guillermo 1996. Another institutionalization: Latin America and elsewhere. Kellogg Institute Working Paper 222. Notre Dame, IN: Kellogg Institute for International Studies.
Ottaway, Marina. 2003. Democracy challenged: The rise of semi-authoritarianism. Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Pasotti, Eleanora, and Bo Rothstein. 2002. In the market for ideas: A quest for a unified conceptual approach in political science. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, August 29–September 1, Boston.
Pejovich, Svetozar. 1999. The effects of the interaction of formal and informal institutions on social stability and economic development. Journal of Markets and Morality 2 (2): 164–81.Google Scholar
Price, Robert M. 1975. Society and bureaucracy in contemporary Ghana. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Riggs, Fred W. 1964. Administration in developing countries: The theory of prismatic society. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Rose-Ackerman, Susan. 1978. Corruption: A study in political economy. New York: Academic Press.
Samuels, David. 2003. Campaign finance as informal contracting institutions: Brazil in comparative perspective.” Paper presented at the conference Informal Institutions and Politics in Latin America, Kellogg Institute for International Studies, University of Notre Dame, April 24–25.
Sandbrook, Richard, and Jay Oelbaum. 1999. Reforming the political kingdom: Governance and development in Ghana's Fourth Republic. Center for Democracy and Development, Critical Perspectives Paper No. 2.
Schedler, Andreas. 2002. The menu of manipulation. Journal of Democracy 13 (2): 36–50.Google Scholar
Schelling, Thomas C. 1960. The strategy of conflict. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Schelling, Thomas C. 1978. Micromotives and macrobehavior. New York: W. W. Norton.
Schotter, Andrew. 1981. The economic theory of social institutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Scott, James C. 1969. Corruption, machine politics, and political change. American Political Science Review 63 (4): 1142–58.Google Scholar
Scott, James C. 1972. Patron-client politics and political change in Southeast Asia. American Political Science Review 66 (1): 91–113.Google Scholar
Scott, James C. 1976. The moral economy of the peasant: Rebellion and subsistence in Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Shepsle, Kenneth A., and Barry R. Weingast. 1981. Structure induced equilibrium and legislative choice. Public Choice 37: 503–19.Google Scholar
Siavelis, Peter. 1997. Executive-legislative relations in post-Pinochet Chile: A preliminary assessment. In Presidentialism and democracy in Latin America, ed. Scott Mainwaring and Mathew Sobert Shugart, 321–62. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Siavelis, Peter 2002a. Exaggerated presidentialism and moderate presidents: Executive-legislative relations in Chile. In Legislative politics in Latin America, ed. Scott Morgenstern and Benito Nacif, 79–113. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Siavelis, Peter 2002b. Informal institutions and democratization: Theoretical lessons from Chile. Paper presented at the conference Informal Institutions and Politics in the Developing World, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, April 5–6, 2002.
Sil, Rudra. 2001. Privatization, labor politics, and the firm in post-Soviet Russia: Non-market norms, market institutions, and the Soviet legacy. In The politics of labor in a global age: Continuity and change in late-industrializing and post-socialist economies, ed. Christopher Candland and Rudra Sil, 205–32. New York: Oxford University Press.
Starn, Orin. 1999. Nightwatch: The politics of protest in the Andes. Durham: Duke University Press.
Stokes, Susan C. 2003. Do informal institutions make democracy work? Accounting for accountability in Argentina. Paper presented at the conference Informal Institutions and Politics in Latin America, Kellogg Institute for International Studies, University of Notre Dame, April 24–25.
Sugden, Robert. 1986. The economics of rights, cooperation, and welfare. New York: Basil Blackwell.
Taylor, Michelle. 1992. Formal versus Informal Incentive Structures and Informal Behavior/ Journal of Politics 54 (4): 1055–73.Google Scholar
Taylor-Robinson, Michelle. 2003. The difficult road from Caudillismo to democracy, or Can clientelism complement democratic electoral institutions? Paper presented at the conference Informal Institutions and Politics in Latin America, Kellogg Institute for International Studies, University of Notre Dame, April 24–25.
Tsai, Lily Lee. 2001. Substituting for the state? The logic of private efficiency in Chinese local governance. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, August 30–September 2.
Tsai, Lily Lee. 2002. Cadres, temple and lineage institutions, and governance in rural China. The China Journal 48 (July): 1–27.Google Scholar
Tsai, Lily Lee 2004. The informal state: Governance and development in rural China. PhD diss., Department of Government, Harvard University.
Ullman-Margalit, Edna. 1978. The emergence of norms. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Van Cott, Donna Lee. 2000. A political analysis of legal pluralism in Bolivia and Colombia. Journal of Latin American Studies 32 (1): 207–34.Google Scholar
Van Cott, Donna Lee 2003. Legal pluralism and informal community justice administration in Latin America. Paper presented at the conference Informal Institutions and Politics in Latin America, Kellogg Institute for International Studies, University of Notre Dame, April 24–25.
Van Oenen, Gijs. 2001. Citizenship and “informal rule of law.” How lax enforcement can sustain the rule of law. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Latin American Studies Association, Washington, DC, September 6–8.
Wang, Hongying. 2000. Informal institutions and foreign investment in China. Pacific Review 13 (4): 525–56.Google Scholar
Waterbury, John. 1973. Endemic and planned corruption in a monarchical regime. World Politics 25 (4): 533–55.Google Scholar
Way, Lucan A. 2002. The dilemmas of reform in weak states: The case of post-Soviet fiscal decentralization. Politics and Society 30 (December): 579–98.Google Scholar
Weingast, Barry. 1979. A rational choice perspective on congressional norms. American Journal of Political Science 23 (2): 245–62.Google Scholar
Weingast, Barry R., and William J. Marshall. 1988. The industrial organization of congress; or, Why legislatures, like firms, are not organized as markets. Journal of Political Economy 96 (1): 132–63.Google Scholar
Weyland, Kurt. 2002. Limitations of rational-choice institutionalism for the study of Latin American politics. Studies in Comparative International Development 37 (1): 57–85.Google Scholar
Wright, Gerald C., Jr., and Michael B. Berkman. 1986. Candidates and policy in United States Senate elections. American Political Science Review 80 (2): 567–88.Google Scholar
Yang, Mayfair Mei-hui. 1994. Gifts, favors, and banquets: The art of social relationships in China. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Yrigoyen Fajardo, Raquel. 2000. The Constitutional recognition of indigenous law in Andean countries. In The challenge of diversity: Indigenous peoples and reform of the state in Latin America, ed. Willam Assies, Gemma van der Haar, and André Hoekema, 197–222. Amsterdam: Thela Thesis.