A Political Economy Approach to the Grammar of Institutions: Theory and Methods

Abstract

This article proposes a political economy approach to the grammar of institutions, by building on the study of contracts in economics. First, I argue that more attention needs to be paid to the costs and benefits of institutions, thus allowing researchers to derive empirically testable hypotheses on the evolution of institutions. In this vein, the role of conditions in studying the grammar of institutions becomes central. Second, I propose, validate, and test an innovative method to study the grammar, based on computational linguistics. This method allows extracting the elements of the grammar in an automated and unsupervised manner, paving the way to large‐N analyses. In so doing, this article seeks to bridge the gap between public policy and political economy.

Conceptualization and measurement of regulatory discretion: Text analysis of 120 years of British legislation

“…How does dependency parsing work? According to Vannoni (2022), each sentence structure consists of words and links (represented by the arrows in Fig. 1) and a root word where there is a unique path from the root to each of the other words in the sentence.…”

A grammar of institutions for complex legal topics: Resolving statutory multiplicity and scaling up to jurisdiction‐level legal institutions

“…By facilitating a rigorous comparison of laws from different countries over time, IG helps qualitative and mixed‐methods researchers systematically code legal rules and rigorously compare one legal institution to another. Advancements in automated translation applications for legal research (DeMattee et al, 2022) coupled with breakthroughs in computational linguistics as a tool for extracting institutional statements (Vannoni, 2022) will make translating and coding legal texts more efficient and thereby accelerate IG's application in comparative law and policy research.…”

“…After using IG to identify which rules are present, researchers can then study the conditions under which rule‐in‐use diverges from the rules‐in‐form. While researchers continue to use and improve IG (e.g., Bushouse et al, 2021; Rice et al, 2021; Schlager et al, 2021; Vannoni, 2022; Watkins & Westphal, 2016), a considerable proportion of IG applications are legal topics in which a single statute or standalone policy defines the legal institution for the jurisdiction; none tell us how to aggregate multiple laws into a single jurisdiction‐level legal institution. While “monocentric legal domains” 1 may appropriately represent some legal topics, increasingly diverse and interconnected societies are likely to politicize and develop increasingly complex legal institutions that contain multiple statutes with overlapping and cross‐referencing rules (Ginsburg, 2020; Katz et al, 2020; Pedriana & Stryker, 2017).…”

Understanding the Emergence of Computational Institutional Science: A Review of Computational Modeling of Institutions and Institutional Dynamics

“…Over time, various approaches have been developed and engaged for the purpose of analyzing institutions and better understanding their effects of behavior; these include frameworks like the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) Framework (Ostrom 2005; and the Social-Ecological Systems (SES) Framework (Ostrom 2009;McGinnis and Ostrom 2014) and tools such as the Institutional Grammar (Crawford and Ostrom 1995;. Existing research notes the potential of computational methodologies (e.g., agentbased modeling, text analysis) to complement existing approaches to institutional analysis (e.g., Ghorbani et al 2013;Pieper et al 2023;Siddiki and Frantz 2022) and scholars have increasingly leveraged these methods for such institutional inquiries (e.g., Olivier and Schlager 2022;Rice et al 2021;Siddiki and Frantz 2023;Vannoni 2022).…”