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 formalinformal 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. ver the last two decades, institutional analysis has become a central focus in comparative politics. Fueled by a wave of institutional change in the developing and postcommunist worlds, scholars from diverse research traditions have studied how constitutional design, electoral systems, and other formal institutional arrangements affect political and economic outcomes.1 These studies have produced important theoretical advances. Nevertheless, a growing body of research on Latin America,2 postcommunist Eurasia,3 Africa,4 and Asia5 suggests

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Building on the separation-of-powers approach in American politics, this article develops a new micro-level account of judicial decision-making in contexts where judges face institutional insecurity. Against conventional wisdom, I argue that under certain conditions the lack of judicial independence motivates judges to “strategically defect” against the government once it begins losing power. The result is a reverse legal–political cycle in which antigovernment decisions cluster at the end of weak governments. Original data on more than 7,500 individual decisions by Argentine Supreme Court justices (1976–1995) are used to test hypotheses about why, when, and in which types of cases judges are likely to engage in strategic defection. Consistent with the theory's predictions, the results of the analysis show a significant increase in antigovernment decisions occurring at the end of weak dictatorships and weak democratic governments. Examining subsets of decisions and controlling for several additional variables further corroborate the strategic account.

In the experiments, each candidate was described using eight characteristics: name, partisanship, positions on policies toward taxation and racial discrimination, and four positions reflecting democratic values. The characteristics of the candidates were randomly generated from the following sets of alternatives:• Name (gender and race/ethnicity): Each candidate was assigned a name from a list of 123 names designed to signal both gender (man or woman) and race/ethnicity (either white, black, or Hispanic) (see Butler and Homola 2017). • Partisanship: Democrat or Republican. • Policy positions: The surveys included two attributes reflecting salient party differences over policy-one on taxation, the other on racial discrimination (see Bartels 2018). -Taxation * Wants to raise taxes on the wealthy. * Wants to lower taxes on everyone, including the wealthy. -Racial discrimination * Believes the government should do more to prevent discrimination against racial minorities. * Believes discrimination against racial minorities is less of a problem now than in the past. • Democratic values: The surveys included four attributes related to core democratic values. -Judicial deference * Said elected officials must obey the courts even when they think that the decisions are wrong. * Said elected officials should not be bound by court decisions they regard as politicized. -Impartial investigations * Said law enforcement investigations of politicians and their associates should be free of partisan influence. * Said elected officials should supervise law enforcement investigations of politicians and their associates. -Compromise * Promises to work for compromise across party lines. * Promises to stand up to the other party.A-1 * Opposes new legislation to require voters to show state-issued ID at the polls. * Supports new legislation to require voters to show state-issued ID at the polls.

Is American democracy under threat? The question is more prominent in political debate now than at any time in recent memory. However, it is also too blunt; there is widespread recognition that democracy is multifaceted and that backsliding, when it occurs, tends to be piecemeal. To address these concerns, we provide original data from surveys of political science experts and the public measuring the perceived importance and performance of U.S. democracy on a number of dimensions during the first year-and-a-half of the Trump presidency. We draw on a theory of how politicians may transgress limits on their authority and the conditions under which constraints are self-enforcing. We connect this theory to our survey data in an effort to identify potential areas of agreement—bright lines—among experts and the public about the most important democratic principles and whether they have been violated. Public and expert perceptions often differ on the importance of specific democratic principles. In addition, though our experts perceive substantial democratic erosion, particularly in areas related to checks and balances, polarization between Trump supporters and opponents undermines any social consensus recognizing these violations.