GOVT1107 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Indirect Election, Divided Government, Direct Election
13 Aug 2018
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Document Summary
Political institutions = rules, procedures and organisations that structure political life. Typically these rules are contained in laws or a legal framework. Institutions de ne who can and who cannot play the game; can impact who wins and who loses and they can also shape politicians incentives and strategies and peoples identities. Classic theories gave little causal importance to institutions: marxism, modernisation theory and cultural approach. Things change drastically in the 1980s and 1990s: institutional turn in comparative politics. Partially a response to changes in the world: third wave of democratisation + fall of communism. Debates about institutional design have real-world relevance: presidential versus parliamentarism, consociational democracy, electoral formula. Explaining variation among otherwise-similar countries such as north and south. Middle ground between structuralism and voluntarism which is less deterministic (and pessimistic) than structuralism and more amenable to theory-building than voluntarism. Has occupied most of the attention of political scientists.
