The Institutional Grammar Research Initiative (IGRI) convenes scholars from around the world who are interested in the study and practice of institutional analysis. Institutions are the rules (e.g., laws), norms (e.g., social norms), and strategies (e.g., behavioral conventions) that govern behavior in social systems. IGRI activities center around the Institutional Grammar (IG) (Crawford & Ostrom 1995, Basurto et. al. 2010, Siddiki et. al. 2011, Frantz & Siddiki 2022), an increasingly prominent paradigm for understanding and measuring institutions. The IGRI supports the generation of rigorous and relevant research, best practices, and resources; it is also dedicated to developing and disseminating these materials to researchers and practitioners around the world.

The IGRI designs its programming around the principles of Commons-Based Peer Production, which encourage collaboration across sectors and the use of open platforms and “Copyleft” licensing to engage scholars in scientific problem-solving wherever they live. The IGRI also supports the development of open-source, open-access, and accessible intellectual products.

IGRI affiliates research a wide variety of themes–all of which highlight a shared commitment to making the IGRI into a hub for international scholarly exchange and theoretical, methodological, and technical knowledge-gathering. The IGRI is structured to provide a myriad of resources (e.g., articles, best practice white papers, dataset repositories, software) and events (e.g., seminars, trainings, workshops, conferences) tailored for researchers, practitioners, and PhD students interested in the IG regardless of experience level.

Theme 1: Advancing Theory and Conceptual Measurement Using the IG

• Integrating the IG into diverse theoretical applications to showcase the utility of the IG in the measurement of theoretical concepts and complementary development of theoretical explanation.

Theme 2: Facilitating the Study of Social Behavior Using the IG

• Exploring interactions among institutions-in-form and institutions-in-use, applying distinctive methods for data collection and analysis of rules in use, as well as fostering efforts toward conceptualizing and testing cognitive infrastructure (e.g., cognitive models) that enable novel approaches to study institutions.

Theme 3: Using the IG in the Study of Institutional Performance

• Using the IG to explore characteristics of governance processes and the relationship between the design of institutions and their performance.

Theme 4: Advancing the Development of Methods to Support Institutional Analysis

• Advancing the development of methods to support institutional analysis through methodological applications, refinements of existing methodological approaches, and development of standards and best practices to guide their use.

Theme 5: Developing Computational Approaches to Support Institutional Analysis

• Development or customization of software to support automation in IG research, including data collection or generation, processing, analysis, validation, or any other stage of the research process.

For more information on each research area, please visit the IGRI Research Themes page.