The Development of Political Institutions

Front matter

Power, Legitimacy, Democracy

Ny Uy

Ag yt

Preface

The Development of Political Institutions: Power, Legitimacy, Democracy sets out to improve upon existing explanations of the development of political institutions, taking a “historical institutionalist” approach to theorize dynamic processes of institutional reproduction, institutional decay, and institutional change. While the literature on “new institutionalism” has been most preoccupied with explaining the stability of institutional arrangements within countries and the divergence of paths of institutional development between countries, this book aims to specify an equally well-developed explanation for the temporal processes by which formal and informal rules and procedures, especially those constitutive of alternative political regimes, may, at different times, (i) acquire a measure of staying power and resistance to change, through their capacity effectively to structure the behavior of relevant actors (institutional reproduction); (ii) suffer major defections contributing to their destabilization and their declining capacity to structure the interactions between the individuals and organizations subject to their provisions (institutional decay); and (iii) experience major transformations in their form and functions, especially as a result of incremental processes (institutional change).

With regard to each of these outcomes, the book seeks to bridge the gap between “power-based” explanations and “ideas-based? “legitimation explanations” of political development. Major theoretical contributions to the historical institutionalist literature have explored the manner in which the “power-distributional” implications of political institutions—that is, their capacity to make “winners” and “losers” of individual and collective actors competing to secure “institutional equilibria” most favorable to their interests—fuel the intergroup conflicts that drive processes of institutional reproduction and institutional change. Meanwhile, though the tradition has x Preface long recognized the potential importance of ideas, the comparative branch of historical institutionalism has largely neglected the development of ideas-based, legitimation explanations, even as scholars in other disciplines have placed growing emphasis on the extra-rational process by which human beings form the preferences, beliefs, and identities that explain their behavior. In practice, bridging the gap between explanations grounded in the logics of “legitimation” and “power” involves the development of improved legitimation explanations as well as the formulation of an integrated explanation focused on the interactions between the “dynamics of power” and the “dynamics of legitimation”

Among its more significant contributions, the book theorizes the “microfoundations” of processes of institutional development, practicing a form of “methodological individualism” that is not coterminous with the assumptions of the rational choice research program. Indeed, to the extent that the social sciences are made more “scientific” by the development of explanations that are consistent with, if not entirely reducible to, the body of knowledge accumulated in disciplines operating at lower levels of aggregation and analysis, the book’s grounding of the theory's microfoundations in the findings of experimental psychology demonstrates that the effort benefits greatly from the adoption of models of human motivation, cognition, and behavior in which nonmaterialist considerations are front and center. The book’s main substantive chapters also examine the conditions, “structural” as well as contingent, accounting for whether, for how strongly, and for how rapidly sequences of institutional reproduction, institutional decay, and institutional change are set in motion, as well as some of the factors affecting the course of such processes downstream. A final chapter draws out the theory’s implications for the viability of efforts to “engineer” desired real-world outcomes through the purposeful design of political institutions.

Though I must take sole responsibility for the fact that this book has been over five years in the making, as well as for any errors still left in its pages, I welcome the opportunity to acknowledge the kindness and generosity of several people who have been instrumental to its publication. At the University of Michigan Press, Dr. Elizabeth Demers believed in the project just as I was beginning to second-guess the wisdom of writing an entire book’s worth of theory, while the anonymous referees offered plenty of excellent advice. I am also grateful for the trust placed in me by Professor Dan Slater, to whom I owe the honor of having my work featured in the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies Series. Along the way, I was fortunate to work

Preface xi under a boss, Professor Mark R. Thompson, who continued to advocate for me when others may have begun to lose patience. Going further back in time, I will never forget the mentorship provided to me as a student by Professors Ronald A. Francisco, Erik S. Herron, and Peter A. Hall. I owe the biggest debt of gratitude, however, to my wife, to whom this book is dedicated. The time it took to write it was punctuated by some of the most trying experiences I have ever lived through. It is thanks to her that, through it all, I never lost sight of what I was working for.

Hong Kong S.A.R., 9 January 2021

CHAPTER ONE Institutional Development The Dynamics of Power and (De)legitimation

The origins of the modern debate over the legitimation of power and the moral foundations of political order are conventionally traced back to the writings of Niccolò Machiavelli ([1517] 1971; [1532] 1971). These themes, to be sure, have featured as a core concern of Western political thought since classical times. Machiavelli, however, is credited with formulating the first “full-fledged,’ explanatory theory in which a political order’s (il)legitimacy ranks as a major cause of its (in)stability (Zelditch 2001: 42). Substantively, what most differentiates Machiavelli's treatment from the largely normative theories of classical philosophers is that whereas Plato and Aristotle assumed that a ruler acts in his own interests when he acts for the good of the ruled, with whom he shares a basic set of norms and values, what mattered to Machiavelli about the ideas through which a ruler secures his legitimacy is their capacity to conceal the extent to which his interests are necessarily at variance with those of his subjects. Indeed, having pioneered the notion that the stability of a system of rule hinges on the “voluntary acceptance” of the governed (Zelditch 2001: 42), Machiavelli had little to say about the values, norms, and beliefs in which aruler’s legitimacy may be grounded, save for highlighting the imperative that one must never dispense with the appearance of “mercy, good faith, integrity, humanity, and religious piety” (Machiavelli [1532] 1971: 284). Instead, Machiavelli (265) drew attention to the ruinous fate said invariably to befall so-called unarmed prophets—rulers who choose to rely on their capacity for persuasion alone in order to maintain their positions of power, in defiance of the fact that “the nature of peoples is changeable; and it is easy to persuade them of something, but it is difficult to fix them in that persuasion” Men in positions of authority must rather see to it that the force of their persuasion is always backed by the force of arms, so as to ensure that their subjects, “when they believe no longer,’ can be “made to believe by force” (265).

Five hundred years on, the importance of physical coercion as the fundamental “determinant” of power (Anderson 1976: 44) is seldom called into question. The role of ideas in the exercise of political power has proven decidedly more controversial in the centuries since. Machiavelli’s “conflict theory” of legitimacy (Zelditch 2001: 42) has exerted a great deal of influence on Marxists and the proponents of other philosophies steeped in materialist worldviews. Meanwhile, contemporary versions of the “consensus theory” of legitimacy have been featured in the works of leading exponents of functionalism (Parsons 1951), modernization theory (Lipset 1959), and economic theories that “implicitly, if not explicitly, deny a role for power and conflict” (Tang 2011: 12), assuming that the choice of policies and institutions is motivated by concerns for efficiency or the general welfare. Thankfully, some of the twentieth century’s most important writings on the subject have demonstrated that the central importance of power and conflict can be acknowledged without dismissing the ideas in which a political order’s legitimacy is grounded as an instrument of mass deception or as a source of “false consciousness,’ in recognition of the influence such ideas can exert on the values, preferences, and beliefs of the powerful and the powerless alike. Antonio Gramsci frequently returned to the subject in his prison notebooks, in which he argued that “intellectual, moral, and political hegemony” is as crucial as physical force to the efficaciousness with which a class or group can assert, exert, and perpetuate its “domination” (dominio) (1977: 2010-11), the stability of which is boosted by the group's capacity to “make society truly advance” (2012). Most foundationally, Max Weber’s ([1919] 1946: 78) definition of a modern “state” requires the successful assertion of claims to a “monopoly of the legitimate use of violence,’ which involves the formation of beliefs among all constituencies subject to its authority that its control of the means of coercion is rightful and proper.

Power, Legitimacy, and the Study of Institutions

For all its importance to the history of political thought, the study of legitimacy has largely faded from the research agenda of present-day political science, where its proponents still find it necessary to remind their audiences of the basic notion that “political power,’ insofar as it is based on “social cohesion,’ needs legitimating (Fukuyama 2011: 42—43). Certainly, the explanatory turn taken by the field of comparative politics in the last several decades (Hall

2003) has yet to produce a consensus over the role that legitimacy plays in the exercise and maintenance of political power, or for that matter the role it ought to play in explanatory theories of political (in)stability. For different reasons, two of the field’s three major research traditions—as defined in Lichbach and Zuckerman (1997)—tend to dismiss its importance to whether individuals obey or disobey authority. Scholars in the “structuralist” camp tend to see obedience as a matter of the physical force and material resources that the more powerful bring to bear on the less powerful (e.g., Skocpol 1979: 31-32; Stinchcombe 1968: 150-51; Tilly 1985: 171-72). With notable exceptions (e.g., Levi 1988, 1997; North 1990; Przeworski 1991: 54—55), moreover, “rationalists” characteristically assume that compliance and noncompliance are the product of an instrumental calculus (Levi 1997: 30).

Left to carry the banner of legitimacy are scholars who share at least some of the assumptions of the “culturalist” tradition (Ross 1997, 2009), above all, the notion that institutions exert “normative force” by providing behavioral models or templates to which individuals often seek to conform, in accordance with a “logic of [social] appropriateness” (March and Olsen 1989; Hall and Taylor 1996: 939-40). It is from this perspective that a classic work on the legitimation of power, while not discounting the importance of either “prudence” or “advantage” as motivations for compliance and obedience, contends that human beings are “moral agents, who recognize the validity of rules, have some notion of the common interest, and acknowledge the binding force of promises they have made—all elements involved in legitimate power” (Beetham 1991: 27). Analogous considerations have more recently prompted Fukuyama (2011: 442) to reiterate that theories of “political development’”—the study of which “necessarily centers around the process by which institutions emerge, evolve, and eventually decay” (Fukuyama 2014: 7; for similar views, see Huntington 1965: 393; North 1990: vii)—must treat “ideas” as “fundamental causes.”

Notoriously “eclectic” and pluralistic in its approach to the workings of institutions (Hall and Taylor 1996: 939-40), “historical institutionalism” has from its inception been open to contributions focused on the role of ideas and the legitimation of power (e.g., Bell 2011: 893-94; Fioretos, Falleti, and Sheingate 2016: 8; Orren and Skowronek 2004: 79-83; Sanders 2006: 41—43; Thelen and Steinmo 1992: 22—26). Indeed, though ideas have not always featured among the tradition’s “core analytical variables” over the past quarter century (Blyth, Helgadottir, and Kring 2016: 142), historical institutionalists have long contemplated explanations centered on the “dynamics of power”

and the “dynamics of legitimation” as two alternatives for making sense of how institutional arrangements reproduce themselves over time (Mahoney 2000: 521—25; see also Orren 1991). Explanations based on the logic of power commonly take the following form:

The institution initially empowers a certain group at the expense of other groups; the advantaged group uses its additional power to expand the institution further; the expansion of the institution increases the power of the advantaged group; and the advantaged group encourages additional institutional expansion. (Mahoney 2000: 521)

Explanations based on the logic of legitimation, instead, take the following form:

The institution that is initially favored sets a standard for legitimacy; this institution is reproduced because it is seen as legitimate; and the reproduction of the institution reinforces its legitimacy. (Mahoney 2000: 524)

In other words, the survival and the entrenchment of institutions may be accounted for by positive feedback mechanisms driven by the logic of “increasing returns to power” (Pierson 2004: 36—37) as well as by the logic of what might be referred to as processes of “increasing legitimation” Processes driven by each of these mechanisms should exhibit the “relatively deterministic properties” that Mahoney (2000: 511) ascribes to self-reinforcing, path-dependent sequences of institutional reproduction— “relative; that is, to the contingency thought to characterize moments of institutional choice. Both mechanisms are also hypothesized to feature their own “dynamic of potential change,’ whose activation after a period of self-reinforcement threatens to disrupt the reproduction of the institution concerned, if not to set in motion processes of institutional change (523). More generally, Thelen (1999: 399) points out that “an understanding of political change is inseparable from— and indeed rests on—an analysis of the foundations of political stability”

In the time since Mahoney (2000) addressed the distinction between “power explanations” and “legitimation explanations” of institutional development, major theoretical contributions to the historical institutionalist literature have explored the manner in which the “power distributional” aspects of political institutions—that is, their capacity to make “winners” or “losers” out of individual or collective actors competing to secure “institutional equilibria” favorable to their interests (Thelen 2004: 32)—drive processes of institutional reproduction and institutional change (Mahoney and Thelen 2010). But while the literature on historical institutionalism did not participate in political science’s ongoing “retreat from the study of power” (Pierson 2015: 124), the same cannot be said with reference to the discipline’s “neglect” of the study of ideas (Berman 1998: chap. 2). Within historical institutionalism, ideas have on occasion continued to feature prominently in accounts of the development of institutions in a variety of settings (for a brief review, see Fioretos, Falleti, and Sheingate 2016: 8). Nonetheless, the tradition’s growing engagement with rational choice institutionalism (Thelen 1999: 380; see also Katznelson and Weingast 2005) and its decisive shift toward a more materialist ontology (Blyth, Helgadottir, and Kring 2016: 146-47; Fioretos, Falleti, and Sheingate 2016: 8—9) are reflected in the fact that “ideas-based,’ “legitimation explanations”—as Mahoney (2000: 523) describes them, explanations grounded in “actors’ subjective orientations and beliefs about what is appropriate or morally correct’—have not kept pace with the theory development that has benefited “power-based accounts” (Blyth, Helgadottir, and Kring 2016), even as scholars in other disciplines have placed growing emphasis on explaining behavior by concentrating on the extra-rational process by which human beings form preferences, beliefs, and social identities (e.g., Ariely 2008; Haidt 2012; Kahneman 2011; Sapolsky 2017; Tyler 2006). Especially within the tradition’s comparative politics branch, it is only more recently that historical institutionalists have “increasingly turned to ideas” (Blyth, Helgadottir, and Kring 2016: 143) in their quest to improve upon explanatory theories of institutional development (see also Blyth 2016).

Once again, it is worth reiterating that the adoption of legitimation explanations requires no departure from historical institutionalism’s signature emphasis on “big questions,’ macro-historical processes, and the importance of time (Pierson and Skocpol 2002). As Bell (2011: 890) has noted, “The notion of agency is actually well established within an important strand of HI thinking” Nor do legitimation explanations violate the tradition’s foundational principles: namely, the notion that political institutions “structure power relations” between political actors, “privileging some and putting others at a disadvantage” (Thelen and Steinmo 1992: 2), as well as the idea that intergroup conflict drives processes of institutional development (Hall and Taylor 1996: 937-38). As Schmidt (2011: 53) herself has pointed out, a sizable portion of the scholarship on “constructivist” or (her word) “discursive” institutionalism has been the work of scholars “who might better be called discursive institutionalists within a historical institutionalist tradition because they see ideas as constitutive of institutions even if shaped by them” Hay (2011: 67), moreover, ascribes to “ideational; “discursive, or “constructivist” institutionalism a series of “analytical and ontological assumptions” that bear a striking similarity to the “distinctive social ontology” that Hay and Wincott (1998: 953) once attributed to historical institutionalism. Similar considerations have prompted Bell (2011: 884) to argue that “a suitably tailored version of historical institutionalism can accommodate a constructivist approach to produce a sophisticated and more rounded account of how interpretive agents interact dialectically with institutional and wider structural contexts and produce change.’

More broadly, to the extent that the realization of historical institutionalism’s full potential rests on the formulation of an improved account of “the relationship between structure and agency” (Hay and Wincott 1998: 951), especially as it pertains to the dynamics of intergroup conflict (Peters, Pierre, and King 2005: 1277-78), acknowledging that institutions are contested because of the distribution of resources they promote as well as the “animating ideas” (Goodin 1996: 26-27; Offe 2006: 12) that political actors want enshrined in a polity’s institutional architecture, or for that matter the implications that alternative institutional equilibria have for the recognition of the status and dignity of different social groups, can only render accounts of intergroup competition more realistic. Indeed, it is not just the case that human conflict can center on competing ideologies, value systems, or claims for “inter-subjective recognition” (Fukuyama 1992) as much as it can be about scarce material resources; also, research on human motivation tends to support Fukuyama’s (2011: 41) contention that material resources often feature in intergroup conflict as “markers of dignity rather than ends in themselves” (e.g., Kahneman 2011: 342; Baumeister 2005: 151-55).

This book, then, sets out to bridge the gap that currently separates legitimation explanations and power explanations of comparative institutional development by way of assembling an explanatory theory that accounts for the manner in which processes of legitimation and delegitimation—and their interaction with processes governed by the logic of power—contribute to the reproduction, the decay, and the gradual transformation of political institutions. In so doing, the book seeks to improve upon existing attempts by historical institutionalists to explain the development of political institutions over time—perhaps above all by addressing the issue of endogenous change, for which the “new institutionalist” literature as a whole has long struggled to produce a general explanation (Schmidt 2010). What is more, the explanatory theory assembled in these pages may inform efforts to “engineer” outcomes in the real world through the purposeful design and redesign of political institutions, the ineffectiveness of which has long been cited as an example of political science’s own failure to live up to its promise (Sartori 1968).

Institutional Development: Reproduction, Decay, and Change

Before moving on to describe in greater detail the book’s contribution to the field of comparative political development and the literature on historical institutionalism, a brief clarification of the study’s explananda is in order. Consistent with much of the existing literature, this book defines “political institutions” as “humanly devised rules and procedures—both formal and informal” (Levitsky and Murillo 2009: 117), whose primary function is to “structure [political] behavior” (Mahoney and Thelen 2010: 4.)—that is, to organize relations of power, govern intergroup competition, and regulate political behavior by way of prescribing certain courses of action, permitting or proscribing others, and imposing penalties on noncompliance (Ostrom 1986; North 1990: 3—6; Thelen and Steinmo 1992: 2-3; Hall and Taylor 1996: 938; Offe 2006). With regard to “institutional reproduction’—a concept whose usage is seldom accompanied by a clear definition—this study eschews conceptualizations overly preoccupied with an institutional arrangement’s capacity formally to remain unchanged over a period of time. On the one hand, mechanisms of institutional reproduction popular in works of historical institutionalism are typically designed to explain more than the survival or persistence of institutions. The logic of “positive feedback” and “increasing returns,’ for instance, refers to temporal dynamics accounting for the growing entrenchment of institutions (Rixen and Viola 2014: 10). On the other hand, the literature on historical institutionalism has stressed the possibility that an institutional arrangement’s reproduction may not even require strict continuity in its form and functions (Thelen 2004: 7-8). As Thelen (293) pointed out, “Formal institutions do not survive long stretches of time by standing still”—their stability being predicated on “their ongoing active adaptation to changes in the political and economic environment in which they are embedded” more than on “the faithful reproduction of those institutions as originally constituted”

Among the viable alternatives to defining “institutional reproduction”

as an institutional arrangement’s preservation in its exact original form, the solution adopted in this study consists of borrowing, with some modification, the definition Huntington (1965: 394) provided for “institutionalization” as the process by which institutions “acquire value and stability” While Huntington’s definition of institutions is broader than the one adopted in this study, in that it encompasses organizations as well as procedures (on the need to distinguish the “players” from the “rules of the game,’ see North 1990: 5), there are at least two compelling reasons for conceptualizing institutional reproduction in this manner. First, it allows for a clearer conceptual distinction between processes of institutional reproduction and institutional decay—which Huntington (1965) himself described as the opposite of institutionalization—by allowing for the possibility that an institutional arrangement’s survival might not signify its reproduction, in the event that it is accompanied by a decline in its value and stability. Second, equating institutional reproduction to the process by which institutions acquire value and stability renders an institutional arrangement’s reproduction compatible with modifications to its form and functions, insofar as the adjustments in question render the institution less vulnerable to decay or displacement.

Indeed, just as Thelen (2004: 7—8) argued that an institution’s reproduction often requires its “active political renegotiation, complete with “heavy doses of institutional adaptation,’ Huntington (1965: 394—401) believed the stability of institutions to hinge on their “adaptability’—their capacity to meet new challenges or to take on new functions in response to environmental changes. Based on these considerations, the study of institutional change featured in this book’s penultimate chapter focuses on more fundamental forms of change. In this context, “fundamental change” describes an institution’s displacement and/or replacement or, rather, a significant shift in its distributional and/or behavioral consequences, which can result from significant modifications to the rules in question as much as from the failure to modify the rules in response to significant changes in their interpretation and/or enforcement (Mahoney and Thelen 2010: 4).

Defining “institutional reproduction” and “institutional decay” as the processes by which institutions acquire or lose, respectively, value and stability also presents potential challenges, not the least of which are those arising from some of the possible meanings of the words “value” and “stability” Proceeding in reverse order, there has been a tendency in the literature from Huntington (1965) onward to equate an institution’s stability with its resilience in the face of the passage of time. Levitsky and Murillo (2009: 117) put it rather succinctly: “By stability, we mean durability.’ This definition is appropriate when measuring the variation in the relative stability exhibited, over a period of time, by the sets of rules and procedures that have governed a particular field or domain of activity in a given country, relative to the same sets of institutions in other countries or to different sets of institutions in the same country. A country described as suffering from “regime instability,’ for instance, is generally understood to be one whose governmental institutions have frequently undergone cycles of breakdown and replacement, relative to other countries. In a study that seeks to explain how and why a particular institutional arrangement becomes more or less stable over time, however, it makes sense to distinguish “stability” from “durability; in the interest of contemplating the possibility that an institution’s instability is neither an inescapable permanence nor a guarantee of its ultimate displacement. More suitable for a study of this kind, therefore, is to define an institution’s stability and instability based on its vulnerability to potential threats to its survival at a given point in time. Of course, power explanations and legitimation explanations ascribe the instability of institutions to different causes: the former, to reversals of power or the breakdown of coalitions supporting the status quo; the latter, to the status quo’s delegitimation.

Challenges of a different nature are presented by the word “value” For if, as Huntington (1965) implied (see also Fukuyama 2011: 452), an institution’s reproduction (in his words, its “institutionalization”) requires that the institution in question becomes increasingly “valued; subjectively, among the actors subject to its provisions, one would be right to object that legitimacy, instead of explaining or contributing causally to the processes of institutional reproduction and institutional decay, is more properly described as an aspect of this book’s explananda. In turn, given this study’s focus on improving legitimation explanations of institutional development, conceiving of institutional reproduction and institutional decay as defined, in part, by the extent to which an institution is subjectively “valued” violates a key requirement of social scientific explanations: namely, the specification of causes that are temporally antecedent to, and conceptually distinct from, their purported “effects” As Gerring (2012: 212) points out, a causal argument in which the purported cause is not “separable from the effect it purports to explain” is a tautological argument. Fortunately, the word “value” is amenable to definitions that enforce the requisite conceptual separation between this study’s explananda and the dynamic processes hypothesized to explain their evolution over time. A possibility is to define an institution’s value not on the basis of how positively or negatively political actors feel about its existence or performance (a component of legitimacy) but rather on the basis of whether an institution structures behavior in a reliable, predictable manner (i.e., its importance or value in shaping or guiding behavior). In other words, an institution’s value is determined by the extent to which it elicits behavior in compliance with its prescriptions and proscriptions. Once again, power explanations and legitimacy explanations ascribe compliance to different causes: the former, to the presence of compelling enough incentives and disincentives; the latter, to the “normative power” of institutions, which helps to shape the motives and the beliefs accounting for the behavior of purposeful actors.

Putting it all together, the next three chapters theorize the development of political institutions along different dimensions. The chapters on institutional reproduction and institutional decay focus on what may be referred to as the depth of institutions. Rixen and Viola (2016) conceive of the depth of institutions as comprising two variables whose definition is rather consistent with the concepts of “value” and “stability” described in this chapter. The first component of an institution’s depth—namely, its strength or weakness—is amenable to a similar conceptualization as the one provided above for an institution’s value, which speaks to the extent to which the institution in question effectively and predictably shapes the behavior to which it is meant to apply. In this sense, “the degree to which an institution’s attributes in £, have strengthened or weakened in t” (2016: 19) may be taken to mean the degree to which an institution has become more or less effective in generating compliance with its provisions. The second component of an institution’s depth—namely, its “resistance to change” and its “robustness in the face of shocks” (19)—may likewise be said to match the definition offered above for the “stability” of institutions. By contrast, the chapter dedicated to institutional change deals with the scope or breadth of institutions. Variations in an institution's breadth, in particular, are understood to involve an increase or a decrease in an institution’s attributes or features, as well as modifications made either to the content of an institution’s provisions or to the range of activities and situations to which such provisions are meant to apply.

Throughout the book, special emphasis is placed on the development of political regimes, whether democratic or nondemocratic. Political regimes are more properly described as configurations of the “formal and informal institutions that structure political interaction” in a given polity (Snyder and Mahoney 1999: 103). Together, the institutions constitutive of different regimes “determine who has the power in society and to what ends that power can be used” (Acemoglu and Robinson 2012: 68), as well as regulate access to positions of authority and govern the political processes by which a society’s laws and policies are drafted, deliberated, and enacted. Of course, the institutions making up a particular regime “often emerge at different times, often for different reasons,’ as opposed to “single moments of wholesale regime transition” (Capoccia and Ziblatt 2010: 240; see also Ziblatt 2006). Even so, it makes sense to address regimes as single institutions whose development is marked by the addition and subtraction of a varied set of attributes or features, as well as changes in their enforcement and stability, to the extent that it is possible to specify a set of criteria for whether the addition or subtraction of a given feature marks a change toward, or away from, a certain type of regime. Following Acemoglu and Robinson (2006, 2012), regimes are described as moving toward greater democracy when changes in their institutional features promote greater political equality and inclusion; likewise, regimes are described as moving toward greater nondemocracy when changes in their institutional features promote greater political inequality and exclusion.

A Synthesis of Power-Based and Ideas-Based Explanations

Practically speaking, bridging the gap between explanations grounded in the logics of legitimacy and power involves (i) the improved specification of legitimation explanations, working toward lessening the distance that separates them from power-based accounts in terms of their theoretical development; and (ii) the assemblage of an integrated theory with “corroborated excess empirical content” (Lakatos 1978: 32) relative to each of the explanations it weaves together—one capable of explaining aspects of institutional development for which explanations relying on the logics of “power” or “legitimacy” alone cannot fully account. With regard to the first of these tasks, the analysis benefits from the engagement of literature on the legitimation of power that has been largely overlooked by historical institutionalists. Each of the ensuing three chapters also examines the conditions, “structural” as well as “contingent,” affecting the likelihood that processes of institutional reproduction, institutional decay, and institutional change, respectively, will be set in motion. What accounts for whether, for how strongly, or for how rapidly mechanisms of institutional reproduction based on the “dynamics of legitimation” are triggered? What circumstances are most commonly responsible for precipitating erosions of legitimacy leading to institutional decay? What does it take for the delegitimation of institutions actually to usher in institutional change? And what forms of institutional change will most likely follow, given the opportunities and constraints presented by the workings of different institutional arrangements in different contexts? More ambitiously, this book concentrates on processes of legitimation and delegitimation not only as the centerpiece of an alternative approach to making sense of the historical development of political institutions but also as the components of an integrated model centered on the interaction between the dynamics of “power” and the dynamics of “(de)legitimation’’