PPM 504: Perspectives on Institutions

Tuesdays, 11:30am – 2:20pm, Parrington 306

Instructor Stephen Kosack Office hours: Mondays, 3:00 – 5:00 Office: Parrington 207B (sign-up link on Evans faculty page)

Course Description

The goal of this course is to introduce you to foundational scholarship on the major institutional forces that influence the policy process. All parts of the policy process, from initial development to implementation and effectiveness, are affected by, and in turn affect, a complex system of citizen preferences and actions, organizations, and ultimately institutions. Understanding this system and the role of institutions in it is crucial to all realistic research on policy, as well as to effective teaching and communication about public policy and management. And understanding these forces and how they operate is the goal of myriad sub-disciplines from across the social sciences. This course therefore involves a highly interdisciplinary survey of scholarship on institutions: their nature, their interaction with citizens and organizations, their origins and development, and their influence on political leaders, public servants, and public policy.

Much of this scholarship is highly theoretical and the accuracy of it is vigorously contested. Why? Because the institutions that affect the policy process are unusual and unstable: not many of them exist and those that do are slow-developing and difficult to reform. Thus unlike in, say, research on the effectiveness of a social program or, more broadly, the study of medicine or atoms, accurate observation of institutions is difficult and experimentation on them is nearly impossible. Yet because they influence so much about what government is and does, evidence of them is all around. For several generations, scholars from political science, sociology, anthropology, and economics have set out to make sense of this evidence, so as to better understand how institutions originate, operate, and change. In this class we will survey many of the foundational products of that collective scholarly enterprise.

We will also assess the ability of these scholarly works to explain institutions. We will seek to understand as much as we can about what they get right and what they do not. We will try to gain

1 an ability to see their perspectives and biases and their theoretical orientations and assumptions, and to critically appraise, integrate, and use them in research and teaching. One goal of PhD training in public policy, whether you intend to use it to become a scholar, researcher, teacher, analyst, or high- level practitioner, is to equip you to communicate an accurate understanding of how policymaking works and how to make it work better, as well as to improve policymaking and our understanding of it through your research or practice. This class is one step toward that goal. At the conclusion of the course, you should be able to: !! understand the classic lines of scholarship on institutions and distinguish how scholars from different disciplines study core challenges in public policy and management; !! recognize the theoretical orientation(s) in the institutional perspectives of scholarly work on public policy and management; !! identify and articulate key theoretical, descriptive, and normative overlaps and distinctions among the different schools of institutional theory; !! critique, integrate, and apply the theories to particular problems of policy and management; and !! use these theories in your teaching and practice, and apply them in your research— ultimately improving our collective understanding of public policy and management.

Course Expectations and Readings

Expectations: This class is largely based on discussion. I will lecture very little. Instead we will spend much of the time discussing the readings so as to understand and critique them. This requires you to go beyond simply reading the assigned work; it requires you to have thought enough about these works to develop, prior to each class, an initial appraisal of their strengths and weaknesses. This is not a simple task, particularly as there is a lot of ground to cover in 10 weeks. I have tried my best to limit your other work for this class and to pare the page count each week—assigning mostly articles and chapters or sections of books instead of whole volumes. In turn I need you to devote enough time outside of class to fully digest these pages. I know you are all busy with many other commitments, so it will be important for you to plan time each week for reading and thinking through the material for this class.

Readings: I suggest that you buy the following books, from which we will read more than two chapters: 1.! Douglass North (1990), Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance, Cambridge University Press 2.! Albert O. Hirschman (1970), Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, Harvard University Press 3.! Robert Axelrod (1984), The Evolution of Cooperation, Penguin 4.! Elinor Ostrom (1990), Governing the Commons, Cambridge University Press 5.! Doug McAdam (1999 [1982]), Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, University of Chicago Press 6.! David Mayhew, (2004 [1974]), Congress: the Electoral Connection, Yale University Press 7.! Anthony Downs (1957), An Economic Theory of Democracy, Addison-Wesley 8.! James Q. Wilson (2000), Bureaucracy, New York: Basic Books

These books are available in the University Bookstore as well as Amazon and most other bookstores. The remaining readings are available on the course Canvas website.

Assignments

This course has assignments of three types: 1.! a weekly case and set of discussion questions (25 percent of your course grade) 2.! a session during which you lead discussion (25 percent) 3.! a final research paper (40 percent)

The final 10 percent of your course grade is class attendance.

Weekly Case and Discussion Questions

To focus your thinking around the class readings, each week you will prepare:

1.! At least two integrating questions that cut across the week’s readings and can help shape our discussion in class. For each class session below, I have provided a set of very basic questions. Your questions should go well beyond these, digging into your sense of the strengths and weaknesses of the week’s readings. Here are three forms of discussion questions you might consider: a.! you can raise concerns about the weaknesses or limitations in one or several authors’ arguments or evidence; b.! you can consider implications of one or several authors’ findings; or c.! you can compare and contrast two or more authors’ arguments.

2.! A case, which you might use in teaching, that reveals either the explanatory power or the flaws of a particular (set of) concept(s) or argument(s). Public policy is an applied field, and the ability to effectively teach and research in it requires an ability to relate academic theories and concepts to specific, concrete situations in the real world. In fact, even though much of the teaching in public policy is based in academic theories and concepts, it is usually taught with cases, not theory. The case assignment for this class is intended to get you thinking in this way right from the start, as well, perhaps, as providing you with the chance to gather cases that you might use later on in your teaching careers.

Please submit these by 9:00am on the day of class.

A Class Session During Which You Lead Discussion

Beginning in week 3, each of you will be responsible for leading an early part of the class discussion each week. Your preparation for this session should involve you taking the two discussion questions and teaching case that you prepare for that week and developing them into a discussion plan, such as you might use before teaching the concept to undergraduate or masters-level students.

Your plan should include, at a minimum, 1.! an introduction or explanation of the key concept(s) and argument(s), and 2.! a discussion around their strengths and weaknesses in explaining the reality of public policy and management that incorporates a real-world case.

But while your discussion plan should include these basic ingredients, it does not have to be organized in this way or this order. Be creative. Try to draw on your knowledge and experience of effective teaching and to place yourself in the shoes of students interested in understanding and improving public policymaking and/or public management. Think of the way of explaining and illustrating the concepts and their usefulness that you, if you were in their shoes, would find most helpful.

Those leading discussions will meet with me during office hours the day before to review the discussion plan and prepare for class.

A Final Paper

Your final assignment is a paper on a policy or management dilemma that is either understandable (even fixable) by applying one or more of the institutional perspectives from class, or for which our current understanding of institutions is insufficient, necessitating further research. In 10-15 double- spaced pages (12-point font, 1-inch margins): 1.! Identify a management or policy dilemma you want to study. Explain why it interests you empirically and/or theoretically. 2.! Drawing on readings from this course or from other sources, situate your dilemma in relevant literature on institutions. How do different schools of institutional theory understand your dilemma? What are the connections and distinctions among the different theories’ understandings? 3.! Frame a research question or questions to explore your dilemma and contribute to the theoretical debate in the literature you’ve reviewed. 4.! Explain which institutional perspective(s) you find most persuasive or promising to explore your dilemma or to answer your research question(s), and why. 5.! Develop a set of hypotheses for empirical testing and/or a set of conclusions or generalizations that your research might uncover about institutions or about management or policy.

Key Dates

!! October 11: Sign up for the weeks that you will lead discussion on the Canvas website. !! October 24: Topic for your final paper. !! November 7: A short plan for your final assignment: topic, preliminary key questions, and descriptive outline. Submit on the Canvas website by 3pm. !! November 28: First draft of your final assignment. Submit on the Canvas website by 3pm. !! December 15: Final assignment due on the Canvas website by 5pm. ! Note: Requests for extensions will only be granted in exceptional circumstances, and only when accompanied by a note from a doctor, dean, or other suitably authoritative source. Unexcused late assignments will be penalized half a point (on the 4.0 point scale) for every day they are late. There will be no exceptions to this policy. !

Course Schedule

October 4 Introduction

Introductions to the class, its structure, and each other.

Required Reading: None

October 11 How to Think about Institutions

What are institutions? How do you know one when you see one? What the major theoretical perspectives on them?

Required Reading (prior to class): 1.! James March and Johan Olsen (1998), “The Institutional Dynamics of International Political Orders,” International Organization 52:4, pp. 943-969. 2.! Jack Knight (1995), “Models, Interpretations and Theories: Constructing Explanations of Institutional Emergence and Change” in J. Knight and I. Sened (eds.), Explaining Social Institutions, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan press, pp. 95-120. 3.! John Meyer (2010), “World Society, Institutional Theories, and the Actor,” Annual Review of Sociology 36, pp. 1-20. 4.! Douglass North (1990), Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance, Cambridge University Press, chapter 1 pp. 3-10. 5.! Peter Hall and Rosemary Taylor, “Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms,” Political Studies 44:4 (1996) 6.! Terry Moe (1984), “The New Economics of Organization,” American Journal of Political Science, 28:4.

Assignments (after class): 1.! Sign up for the weeks that you will lead discussion on the Canvas website.

October 18 The Economic Perspective

What is the economists’ perspective on institutions? How do scholars with this perspective try to reconcile it with the key difficulties it has explaining reality?

Guest Instructor: Professor Mary Kay Gugerty

Required Reading (prior to class): 1.! Douglass North (1990), Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance, Cambridge University Press, chapters 2-8, pp. 11-69. 2.! Albert O. Hirschman (1970), Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, Harvard University Press, chapters 1-3, pp. 1-43; chapter 7 recommended but not required. 3.! Armen Alchian and Harold Demsetz (1972), “Production, Information Costs, and Economic Organization,” American Economic Review, 62:5, pp. 777-795. 4.! Kenneth Shepsle (1986), “Institutional Equilibrium and Equilibrium Institutions,” in H. Weisberg (ed.) Political Science: The Science of Politics, New York: Agathon, pp. 51-82. 5.! Kathleen Thelen (1999), “Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics,” Annual Review of Political Science 2, pp. 369-404. 6.! Terry Moe (2005), “Power and Political Institutions,” Perspectives on Politics, 3:2, pp. 215-233.

Recommended: 7.! William Riker (1980), “Implications from the Disequilibrium of Majority Rule for the Study of Institutions,” American Political Science Review, 74:2, pp. 432-446. 8.! Oliver Williamson (1981), “The Economics of Organization: The Transaction Cost Approach,” American Journal of Sociology.

Assignments (submit on the Canvas website by 3pm on Monday, October 24): 1.! Topic for your final assignment

October 25 Institutions and Collective Action: from Individuals to Groups

How do individuals act collectively without institutions? How does their collective action interact with institutions? How do institutions shape collective action?

Required Reading (prior to class): 1.! Robert Axelrod (1984), The Evolution of Cooperation, Penguin, chapters 1-3, pp. 3-69. 2.! Elinor Ostrom (1990), Governing the Commons, Cambridge University Press, chapters 1, 2, and 6, pp. 1-57 and 182-215. 3.! Terry Moe (1991), “Politics and the Theory of Organizations,” Journal of Law Economics, and Organization, 7, pp. 106-29. 4.! Mancur Olson (1982), The Rise and Decline of Nations, Yale University Press, chapter 2, pp. 17-35. 5.! Gary Becker (1983), “A Theory of Competition Among Pressure Groups for Political Influence,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 98:3, pp. 371-400.

Recommended: 6.! Mancur Olson (1971), The Logic of Collective Action, Harvard University Press. 7.! John Gaventa (1982), Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley, University of Illinois Press 8.! James Fearon and David Laitin (1996), “Explaining Ethnic Cooperation,” American Political Science Review, 90, pp. 715-735. 9.! Daniel Posner (2004), “The Political Salience of Cultural Difference: Why Chewas and Tumbakas Are Allies in Zambia and Adversaries in Malawi,” American Political Science Review, 98, pp. 529-46.

November 1 The Sociological Perspective

What is the sociologists’ perspective on institutions and organizations? How do scholars with this perspective try to reconcile it with the key difficulties it has explaining reality?

Required Reading (prior to class): 1.! John Meyer and Brian Rowan (1977), “Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony,” American Journal of Sociology, 83:2, pp. 340-363. 2.! Mark Granovetter (1985), “Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness,” American Journal of Sociology 91:3. 3.! Doug McAdam (1999 [1982]), Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, University of Chicago Press, introduction and chapters 1-3, pp. vii-59. 4.! W. Richard Scott (1998), Organizations: Rational, Natural and Open Systems, Prentice Hall. Read chapter 2 through page 49; this is intended as historical overview on theories of formal organization, especially Weberian bureaucracy. 5.! Paul Dimaggio and Walter Powell (1983), “The Iron Cage Revisited,” American Sociological Review 48:2

Recommended: 6.! Charles Perrow, (1972), Complex Organizations, McGraw-Hill

Assignments (submit on the Canvas website by 3pm on Monday, November 7): 1.! Short plan for your final assignment: topic, preliminary key questions, and descriptive outline.

November 8 Origins

Where do institutions come from? How do individuals, groups, and organizations shape the development of institutions?

Required Reading (prior to class): 1.! Samuel Huntington (1968), Political Order in Changing Societies, Yale University Press, chapter 1, pp. 1-91. 2.! Kathleen Thelen (1999), “Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics,” Annual Review of Political Science 2, pp. 369-404. 3.! review Knight (1995) from week 2. 4.! Theda Skocpol (1973), “A Critical Review of Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy,” Politics & Society, 4:1, pp. 1–34 5.! Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson (2006), Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Cambridge University Press, chapter 2, pp. 15-47 (chapter 1 recommended) 6.! Douglass North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast (2009), “Violence and the rise of open-access orders,” Journal of Democracy, 20, pp. 55-68.

Recommended: 7.! Douglass North and Barry Weingast (1989). “Constitutions and Commitment: Evolution of the Institutions Governing Public Choice in 17th Century England,” Journal of Economic History, 49, pp. 803-832. 8.! Barrington Moore, Jr. (1966), Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World, Cambridge: Beacon Press, esp. chapters VII - IX, pp. 413-483. 9.! Theda Skocpol (1979), States and Social Revolutions, Cambridge University Press. 10.!Robert Dahl (1971), Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition, Yale University Press.

November 15 Change

How do institutions change? How do individuals, groups, and organizations shape institutional change? How does the past influence whether and how institutions change?

Required Reading (prior to class): 1.! Douglas North (1990), Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance, Cambridge University Press, chapters 9-11, pp. 73-104 2.! Mancur Olson (1982), The Rise and Decline of Nations, Yale University Press, chapter 3 pp. 36-74. 3.! Clemens, Elizabeth, and James Cook (1999) “Politics and Institutionalism: Explaining Durability and Change,” Annual Review of Sociology 25. 4.! Michael Hannan and John Freeman (1984), “Structural Inertia and Organizational Change,” American Sociological Review 49:2. 5.! James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen, “A Theory of Gradual Institutional Change,” in “Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency, and Power,” Cambridge University Press, pp. 1-37.

Recommended: 6.! Paul Pierson (2004), Politics in Time, Princeton University Press 7.! Paul Pierson (2000), “The Limits of Design: Explaining Institutional Origins and Change.” Governance 13:4, pp. 475-499. 8.! Avner Greif (2006), Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy, Cambridge University Press.

November 22 Institutions and Political Leaders

What incentives and constraints do institutions create for political leaders?

Required Reading (prior to class): 1.! Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, James Morrow, Randolph Siverson, and Alastair Smith (2002), “Political Institutions, Policy Choice and the Survival of Leaders,” British Journal of Political Science, 32:4, pp. 559–590. 2.! George Tsebelis (1995), “Decision Making in Political Systems: Veto Players in Presidentialism, Parliamentarism, Multicameralism and Multipartyism,” British Journal of Political Science, 25, pp. 289-325. 3.! David Mayhew, (2004 [1974]), Congress: the Electoral Connection, Yale University Press, chapter 2. Chapter 1 highly recommended but not required. 4.! Anthony Downs (1957), An Economic Theory of Democracy, Addison-Wesley, chapters 1- 4, pp. 3-74, and chapters 7-8, pp. 96-141.

Recommended: 1.! Documentary: Richard Attenborough’s “Gandhi”

Assignments (submit on the Canvas website by 3pm on Monday, November 28): 1.! First draft of your final assignment

November 29 Institutions and the Bureaucracy

What incentives and constraints do institutions create for the bureaucracy and for bureaucrats?

Required Reading (prior to class): 1.! James Q. Wilson (2000), Bureaucracy, New York: Basic Books, Chapters 1 and 7-9, pp. 3-13 and 113-175. 2.! Terry Moe and Michael Caldwell (1994), “The Institutional Foundations of Democratic Government: A Comparison of Presidential and Parliamentary Systems,” Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, 150:1, pp. 171-195. 3.! Daniel Carpenter (2001), The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy, Princeton University Press, Introduction and Chapter 1, pp. 1-36. 4.! James Scott (1998), Seeing like a State, Yale University Press, Introduction and Chapter 1, pp. 1-52 5.! Terry Moe (2013), “Delegation, Control, and the Study of Public Bureaucracy,” in Robert Gibbons and John Roberts, eds., The Handbook of Organizational Economics, Princeton University Press.

Recommended: 1.! Terry Moe, “The Politics of Bureaucratic Structure,” in John Chubb & Paul Peterson (eds.), Can the Government Govern?, Brookings Institution Press. 2.! Mark Moore (1995), Creating Public Value: Strategic Management in Government, Harvard University Press. 3.! Michael Lipsky (1980), Street-Level Bureaucracy, Russell Sage Foundation. 4.! Documentary: The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara 5.! Atul Gawande, “Testing, Testing: The health-care bill has no master plan for curbing costs. Is that a bad thing?,” The New Yorker, December 14, 2009.

December 6 Institutions and Policy ! How do institutions shape policy? How do they shape the ability of individuals, groups, and organizations to influence policy? To what extent, if any, does policy shape institutions?

Required Reading (prior to class): 1.! Gene Grossman and Elhanan Helpman (2002), Special Interest Politics, MIT Press, Chapter 1 and 8, pp. 1-16 and 247-282. 2.! Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote (2001), “Why Doesn’t the United States Have a European-Style Welfare State?” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2, pp. 187-254. 3.! Robert Bates (1981), Markets and States in Tropical Africa: The Political Basis of Agricultural Policies, University of California Press, Chapter 5 and “Commonalities and Variations: The Politics of Agricultural Policy,” pp. 81-95 and 119-132. 4.! Terry Moe (2011), Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools, Brookings Institution Press, Chapter 1, pp. 1-25. 5.! Suzanne Mettler (2016), “The Policyscape and the Challenges of Contemporary Politics to Policy Maintenance,” Perspectives on Politics, 14:2, pp. 369-390.

Recommended: 1.! E. E. Schattschneider (1960), The Semi-Sovereign People: A Realist’s View of Democracy in America, Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 2.! Robert Dahl (1974), Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City, Yale University Press. 3.! Theda Skocpol (1992), Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: the Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States, Harvard University Press 4.! Larry Bartels (2009), Unequal Democracy: the Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, Princeton University Press. 5.! Jacob Hacker (2002), The Divided Welfare State: the Battle over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States, Cambridge University Press. 6.! Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez (2007), “How Progressive is the U.S. Federal Tax System? A Historical and International Perspective,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 21:1, pp. 3-24. ! ! Your Final Assignment is due on the Canvas website by 5pm on December 15

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