Le fonctionnement normal des municipalités associe trois pôles : le conseil municipal, le maire ou la mairesse, et l’administration. Pourtant, dans quinze villes québécoises, on trouve également un comité exécutif, souvent présenté comme l’équivalent local d’un conseil des ministres. Rarement analysé, sa présence interroge pourtant la politisation des institutions municipales, conçue ici en référence avec la place croissante des partis politiques ainsi que la prise en main du processus décisionnel par les élus et les élues. À partir d’une analyse institutionnelle et documentaire, l’article montre que le comité exécutif participe à la politisation des institutions municipales de trois façons. Lieu de l’action municipale efficace, il est aussi celui du jeu politique et partisan sous l’autorité mayorale, ainsi que celui de la professionnalisation politique. Sa présence sur la scène médiatique défie également l’étiquette apolitique traditionnellement attribuée aux municipalités. En outre, il illustre une certaine hétérogénéité dans le fonctionnement des municipalités québécoises, qui tiennt compte des différentes réalités politico-territoriales par-delà des modèles institutionnels relativement semblables.

Chile has undergone two consecutive failed attempts at constitutional replacement (2021–2022 and 2023), positioning it as a globally interesting case. While existing literature identifies macropolitical and institutional factors underlying such failures, certain key causal mechanisms remain unexplored. This article addresses the central question of why majority-controlling political actors, aware of the need for broad national consensus, ultimately fail to achieve it. Framed as a two-level process—one at the elite negotiation level and the other at the electoral ratification level—this study elucidates the mechanisms operating at each stage that contributed to this dual failure. By analyzing these dynamics in detail, the article offers valuable lessons for future efforts to replace a constitution in a democratic setting.

This research addresses the question of how the institutional frame of “nonprofitness” shapes the civic activities pursued by community-based nonprofit organizations (CBOs). Specifically, we study how an organizational commitment and orientation to traditional nonprofit values affect activities that foster collective civic action. We draw on the theoretical frame of institutionalism to examine the role of CBOs as organizational actors that foster civic health through their collective civic action. Our research employs a structural equation model to test associations among several constructs, highlighting the interaction of key variables and activities. Based on our analysis of original survey data, we argue that nonprofits develop a civic capacity through the praxis of nonprofit values, civic health activities, and collective civic action. Our findings extend existing research through new measurement tools that capture the institutional orientation of community-based nonprofits that shapes the nature of their involvement in civil society and collective civic action.

This article examines elite European discourses during the Greek financial crisis from its pre‐history in September 2008 up to the arrival of the SYRIZA government in January 2015. The article employs the conceptual literature on Discursive Institutionalism (DI) and Historical Institutionalism (HI). Having coded 1,153 unique quotes drawn from a dataset of 15,354 news wires from Reuters, the authors argue that the communicative discourse of 63 senior European (and IMF) officials on the Greek crisis during that period demonstrates significant volatility. Four distinct narrative frames are identified: ‘neglect’, ‘suspicious cooperation’, ‘blame’ and ‘reluctant redemption’, punctuated by three discursive junctures in 2010, 2011 and 2012, which reflect the content of the changing communicative discourse of the Greek crisis. The article's contribution is twofold: empirically, it is the first to provide a systematic analysis of the protagonists’ communication of the Greek crisis; and theoretically, it combines DI and HI in an effort to conceptualise an important part of our understanding of ‘bail‐out politics’ throughout the Eurozone crisis.

This article offers an institutionalist assessment of the more recent chapters of political opposition in Erdoğan’s Turkey. There is good reason to suppose that the institutional features of a given regime can explain the performance of opposition parties to a significant extent. That said, the case of Turkey provides impressive evidence that there are striking limits to institutionalizing political predominance, to undermining political oppositions by institutional means, and to explaining the performance of opposition parties with the prevailing institutional resources and constraints. Specifically, attempts at institutionalizing a predominant power status carry particular risks of generating inverse effects, including increased political vulnerability. However, there are no automatic effects. Rather, as the Turkish experience suggests, reasonably vigorous actors to become politically relevant must seize the particular (if usually limited) opportunities arising from advanced institutional autocratization.

What explains variation in tax outcomes between European states? Previous studies emphasise the role played by political institutions, but focus mostly on the input side of politics – how access to power and policy making is structured – and the institutions of relatively recent times. It is argued in this article that output‐side institutions related to the implementation of political decisions also matter and have deep institutional origins. As the classic literature has argued, the early modern period from 1450 to 1800 was formative for the development of fiscal capacity, but European states diverged in the stock of capacity they acquired. This article tests whether these differences still affect contemporary tax outcomes using a novel measure of fiscal capacity, based on the age, extent and quality of state‐administered cadastral records. The empirical analysis shows that, on average, countries with higher early modern fiscal capacity have higher tax revenue today, compared to countries with lower early modern fiscal capacity. This association is robust to different model specifications and alternative measurements. The findings have important policy implications as they indicate how deeply the current fiscal problems of the continent are entrenched, but also point to what needs to be prioritised within ongoing tax reforms.

This article is the result of concern about some developments in comparative politics, and it offers some points for discussion. It seems that three trends unduly confine the domain, scope and quality of research in the field. The subdiscipline (1) hardly deals with the social sources of political phenomena anymore and is disproportionally engaged with institutional analysis, (2) almost exclusively focuses on questions of (cross-national) variation and disregards important issues of similarity, and (3) too easily, and without reflection on the history of the field, produces ‘new’ theories and concepts in reaction to the charge that its central concepts (particularly the state) have become theoretically obsolete and empirically valueless.

Political science has embraced institutional analysis to the degree that it has become a truism to say that we are ‘all institutionalists now’. Yet, despite this turn towards institutional analysis, most studies have focussed on the political as opposed to the policy implications of institutions. As a result, the direct and indirect effects of institutions on concrete policy output have received scarce attention. This article outlines the developments to date and presents the overall findings of the articles in this volume.

This paper uses the edited volume To Profit or Not to Profit; The Commercial Transformation of the Nonprofit Sector as an opportunity to review the theories of the nonprofit sector based on the utility maximization behavioral model linked to neoclassical economics. The existence of a large nonprofit sector and its increasing commercialism undermines the logical sufficiency of these theories to explain organizational behavior. The book in question is an effort to solve that problem and reconcile the utility maximization model with seemingly contradicting evidence. In the end, however, these efforts are not very successful and lead to the partial acceptance of an alternative model, grounded in the neo-institutional theory of organizations.

This article argues that a within‐case analysis of the causes and patterns of the institutionalisation of rating in the German financial system offers fresh insights into change in the major socioeconomic institutions of advanced capitalism. Using the method of systematic process analysis, the article explores the expansion of credit rating in the German banking system from three perspectives: historical (power), sociological (diffusion) and behavioural institutionalism (prospect theory). It demonstrates that the proliferation of credit rating resulted from a change of preference on the part of large banks. With Germany as a least likely case for successfully implementing rating, the study's main lesson is that institutional analysis may benefit from incorporating behavioural institutionalism into the analysis of preference change because this cites economic motivations as causes of preference shifts and institutional changes.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ), often referred to as the “World Court,” plays a central role in the field of international law. Despite the significance of this court, socio-legal scholarship has not examined the ICJ’s inner workings due to limited access. Drawing from field theory and organizational theory, this study addresses this gap by using various data sources including interviews, organizational documents, and publicly available texts from insiders. Based on this data, this article explores how the ICJ’s institutional context shapes its organization and the experiences of its actors. We argue that the ICJ provides a space that tightly connects institutional myths, organizational practices, and individual action. This tight coupling effectively mediates and manages differences among ICJ actors, fostering a stable practice of international law within a field otherwise marked by conflict. This enables the ICJ to produce and sustain a specific way of doing international law which has stabilizing effects in this field. By linking the macro level of the field – an area emphasized in prior scholarship – with a microlevel organizational perspective, this article offers a nuanced understanding of the conflicts and organizational practices influencing the ICJ’s operations and development of international law.