ANTH E600/POLS Y673/SPEA P170: INSTITUTIONAL THEORY
- Instructor: Jessica Steinberg
- 3:00 – 5:00 p.m. Tuesday
The central questions underlying this course are:
- How can fallible human beings achieve and sustain self-governing ways of life and self- governing entities as well as sustaining ecological systems at multiple scales?
- When we state that institutions facilitate or discourage effective problem-solving and innovations, what do we mean by institutions and what other factors affect these processes?
- How do we develop better frameworks and theories to understand behavior that has structure and outcomes at multiple scales (e.g. household use of electricity affecting household budget and health as well as community infrastructure and investments and regional, national, and global structures and outcomes)?
- How can institutional analysis be applied to the analysis of diverse policy areas including urban public goods, water and forestry resources, and healthcare?
To address these questions, we will have to learn a variety of tools to understand how fallible individuals behave within institutions as well as how they can influence the rules that structure their lives. This is a particularly challenging question in an era when global concerns have moved onto the political agenda of most international, national, and even local governing bodies without recognizing the importance of the local for the global. Instead of studying how individuals craft institutions, many scholars are focusing on how to understand national and global phenomena. It is also an era of substantial political uncertainty as well as violence, terrorism, and disruption. Many of the problems we are witnessing today are due to a lack of understanding of the micro- and meso- levels that are essential aspects of global processes.
The following themes are developed through the semester, where specific course topics are indicated in parentheses:
- utility: preferences and outcomes (theories of human agency)
- institutions create an incentive environment; affect choices of agents (institutions & performance;)
- part of the environment includes other agents, whose choices may affect the outcomes for the agent; may lead to coordination problems and compliance & production problems (focal points; culture; compliance; common pool resource management)
- preferences may be at odds with one another; interdependence becomes rivalrous (divisible goods; power)
- agent response to incentives depends upon historical path, context, and perspective. (culture; diversity; path dependence)
