Leonid Hurwicz 1971 “Centralization and Decentralization in Economic Processes” in Eckstein (ed.), Computation of Economic Systems

Also, Campbell, John L 2004. Institutional Change and Globalization. (Princeton University Press). Chapter four is rather enlightening in its discussion of ideational causes of institutional change.

tim b – institutionalism, in political science usually (but by no means always, refers to the study of the rules that govern political and social life. The encyclopedia entry linked to in 7. is a great intro.

Two great short lit reviews are in the first Cox and McCubbins book (Legislative Leviathan) and in Brian Crisp’s Democratic Institutional Design (Stanford, 2000). I like the latter because it has one of the best efforts I know of to show that “rational choice” and “historical” institutionalism need not be seen as opposing camps. Indeed, I have always seen my own work as combining both perspectives, though I have never spelled out the synthesis as well as Crisp does.

Of course, nothing on institutions is complete without Madison or a good review of Madison’s contributions.

I would suggest Putnam’s Making Democracy Work, with all its flaws, just as a treatment of to what extent formal institutions matter and to what extent their consequences depend on something else.

Also, the Philip Petit chapter in Goodin’s Theory of Institutional Design, which has been mentioned, is great in connecting institutions at the explanatory level (relationship between institutions and practice), assumptions of behavior and behavioral posits, and normative claims. To that I would add, Bo Rothstein’s Just Institution’s Matter.

On the ideational side—and in the sense of coherence or a “fit” between the ideas and knowledge of the creators of institutions and those that shape the practice of people who “live under” them, James Scott’s Seeing Like a State is good. Sam Bowles piece “Endogenous Preferences: The Cultural Consequences of Markets and other Economic Institutions” is also great in this vein.

Sam Bowles’ work on communities and pro-social norms, and on institutions as ecological niches, on institutional and behavior co-evolution seems are interesting attempts at explaining institutions and institutional development in evolutionary and bio-evolutionary terms are certainly worth looking at.

What seems to be missing in the list is work on deliberation in politics—both in institutional design and the effect of institutions on. Sabel’s “Design, Deliberation, and Democracy: On the New Pragmatism of Firms and Public Institutions” I recall being a good piece, but it’s been years.

Are your students supposed to study just this course for the semester? If you want them to read these texts with a critical eye, then they should go chase additional references in the bibliography by themselves, and do some additional reading which they select through their own appraisal of the literature.

My feeling is that this bibliography gives more than just the key readings, which I always feel as a bit of a shame since it incites students to stick just to the course literature and, conversely, does not incite them to go ref-chasing through journals, authors, reviews, etc. In my opinion, three or four texts per session should do the trick and trigger ‘additional curiosity’, but that’s just me.

As you can see, I’m adrift on this particular intellectual stream.

Anyhow, each of the main protagonists wrote a vox pop explanation of their case for Finance and Development, and they are – in my opinion – good, clear explanations of the arguments at hand.

The links are: ‘Acemoglu’, ‘Rodrik’, ‘Sachs’

For what it’s worth, as I understand it (and IIRC), Acemoglu’s argument about the interaction between geography and institutions and development differs from Sokolof too. Instead of factor endowments, it’s disease environment and its impact on settler mortality that determined the nature of future institutions.

Something from John Meyer and his collaborators, perhaps “World Society and the Nation State,” American Journal of Sociology, 103 (1997), pp.144–81.

I’ll think of more later.

The interface and interactions between norms and institutions is half the fun (cf. Cass Sunstein’s work)