Institutions are conceived of as constraints that humans devise to shape human behavior and interaction (i.e., strategies, rules, norms). They can exist de jure, as in public policies, or de facto, as in social norms. Institutional analysis examines how various kinds of written and understood institutions are created or designed, and how they affect human choices and societal outcomes. In studying the design of institutions, scholars examine (1) how strategies, rules, and norms are structured and (2) what they can tell use about the “who, when, what, why, how and where.” Scholars evaluate how institutional design impacts behavior in practice as well as the attainment of institutional goals.
The Institutional Grammar (IG) is a theoretical approach used to organize the content of governing institutions into generalizable features, with a focus on assessing behavioral outcomes. Sue Crawford and Elinor Ostrom developed the IG in 1995, when they first argued that institutions are comprised of individual behavioral directives and, further, that these directives typically convey common types of information: an action; an actor associated with this action; whether this action is required, allowed, or forbidden; the temporal, spatial, and procedural parameters of the action; and rewards or sanctions for performing or failing to perform the action as prescribed.
The IG proposed a linguistic syntax for assigning each type of information a unique syntactic element. Organizing the content of institutional directives in this way enables institutional analysts to systematically collect and analyze how institutions intend to compel behavior, which can in turn be used to evaluate behavior in practice. Taken together, syntactically-parsed data provide new insights into the scope of institutions.
If you would like to join our email listserv to receive notifications of upcoming seminars, workshops, training sessions, and other activities, please subscribe!
