Across the many forms of organization that distinguish our social species – surgical teams, firms, markets, bureaucracies, professions, caste orders – labour is divided, and the divided activities are integrated coherently by distinctive schemes that fall across a range of possibilities. We require a principled account of the dimensions along which such schemes vary. This paper supplies one organized around two axes. The primary axis distinguishes task, role, and station differentiation, according to the unit on which the differentiated labour assignment lands. The secondary axis is governed by the placement of coordinative labour itself (the labour by which first-order labour is organized): non-mediated, intermediated (through a coordinator or organization), or diffuse (across signals, practices, and inherited arrangements). Across these three categories, the paper develops six (non-exhaustive) mechanisms of integration: mutual adjustment or negotiated coordination; direction or administered rule; and signal-mediated coupling or sedimented normative coordination. The paper distinguishes civic self-government by the placement not only of ongoing coordination but of vigilance and the labour of revising the scheme. The resulting taxonomy, available to all social science, distinguishes the terrain of division-cum-coordination from the economic forces that produce movement across it, including specialization gains, coordination and communication costs, technological change, and entrepreneurial judgement.

The paper revisits the place of social institutions in the development of postwar mathematical economics through the work of Kenneth Arrow and Leonid Hurwicz. The rise of formal economic theory is often associated with a turn away from institutions. This paper argues, however, that efforts to bring institutions within the scope of economic analysis were themselves an important dimension of mathematisation. Drawing on published works and archival materials, the paper traces how Arrow and Hurwicz sought to extend economic analysis beyond the competitive market to broader forms of social and economic organisation. Their efforts proceeded through abstraction: by reformulating problems posed in terms of markets and prices as more general problems of information, coordination, communication, and incentives, they developed frameworks within which markets and other institutional arrangements could be represented and compared. The paper thus highlights the conceptual work required to make social institutions into objects of mathematical economic analysis.

This article explains why Ghana’s weak, building-focused property rating regime has persisted despite fiscal arguments for bringing land value more directly into local revenue systems. It argues that the problem lies not only in poor records, valuation constraints, weak enforcement, and low compliance but also in the relationship between the tax authority and the land authority. Metropolitan, Municipal, and District Assemblies have formal authority to raise property rates, yet the land relations needed to support land-based taxation, including information, valuation evidence, liability, legitimacy, and revenue expectations, remain partly shaped by customary authority. The article develops the concept of tax authority/land authority divergence to explain how land-based property tax reform can be constrained when the authority to tax and the authority to define, allocate, and legitimate land rights do not fully coincide. Drawing on documentary analysis, historical evidence, and 32 qualitative interviews, it shows how Ghana’s building-focused regime can remain fiscally weak but institutionally durable: it gives local governments a formal property tax instrument while leaving land value largely outside the recurrent local tax base.

Income share agreements (ISAs), in which investors fund a student’s education in exchange for a share of future income, offer an accessible option for financing tertiary education in low-income country contexts. Nevertheless, income-based repayments raise concerns about potential opportunism among graduates, such as understating income to minimize education costs. Addressing the need for evidence on the institutional determinants of graduates’ contractual compliance, this study asks: What is the governance structure, composed of formal and informal institutional elements, of an ISA education financing programme in a low-income country context? Based on semi-structured interviews with 26 graduates of a Rwandan ISA programme, it identified a set of shared behavioural norms, which shape graduates’ evaluations of the programme. ISA governance is shown to rely on a coupling of bilateral, formal ISA rules and shared behavioural norms, with multilateral reciprocal norms. Compliance with these norms is promoted through informal enforcement mechanisms.

Existing corporate law theory has largely analysed the corporation through the lenses of agency and contract, leaving its cognitive dimension undertheorised. This article develops a cognitive institutionalist theory of corporate law by integrating legal institutionalism with externalist cognitive science. Corporate cognition arises where routines, interpretive frameworks, and modular information structures process dispersed information within a bounded system and generate judgements that depend on its organisation. The corporation can be understood as a legally constituted cognitive system, with corporate law providing the constitutive infrastructure through which that capacity is formed, attributed, and preserved. This infrastructure comprises three sets of legal mechanisms: legal personality and asset partitioning establish the boundary and interface of the system; the corporate organ structure and its decision rules convert conflicting interpretations into an attributable corporate position; and fiduciary duties supply metacognitive governance, protecting collective decision-making from the epistemic failures inherent in the organisational architecture. Under this framework, doctrines such as veil piercing, the business judgement rule and takeover review are re-examined for their effects on organisational cognition, offering new insights into longstanding scholarly inquiries.

This paper explores the concept of interoperability as a fundamental principle in polycentric governance systems, challenging the primacy of overarching rules in maintaining order and coordination. We argue that interoperability offers a more flexible and practical approach to managing complex, heterogeneous governance landscapes. Drawing on insights from institutional economics, network analysis, and Hayekian social theory, we develop a conceptual framework for understanding interoperability in polycentric systems. By prioritizing functional compatibility over consensus, interoperability enables even more diverse governance entities to cooperate effectively without requiring overarching rules or objectives. This reframing of polycentricity opens new avenues for designing adaptive, resilient governance frameworks capable of addressing the challenges of deep social heterogeneity and rapid change.

Cultural groups often differ in how much they trust political institutions. Yet such differences need not reflect culture alone or at all because cultural groups are frequently embedded in distinct institutional environments. I examine this issue in Switzerland, where linguistic diversity overlaps with cantonal federalism and allows language-group differences in trust to be studied across and within institutional contexts. Using pooled cross-sectional survey data, I find that French-speaking respondents report lower trust in cantonal authorities than German-speaking respondents in national comparisons. This gap attenuates sharply within cantons, indicating that much of the national difference is associated with between-canton variation. Consistent with this pattern, the national French–German gap is substantially attenuated when cross-cantonal differences in direct-democratic participation rights are taken into account. Evidence from bilingual cantons further reinforces this contextual interpretation, as language-group differences vary in ways consistent with minority status rather than following a uniform French–German divide.

There is a broad agreement that political and economic institutions matter for long-term development. Yet relatively little is known as to how to adopt good-quality institutions and reform weak institutions, for which one needs to know how they change. This paper provides a systematic econometric investigation of long-run patterns of institutional change, using panel time series methods allowing for different forms of country-specific heterogeneity and cross-section dependence. We focus on variables capturing the quality of four key political and economic institutions over 200 years and 161 countries from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) database: electoral democracy and executive constraints, for political institutions; and the rule of law and property rights, for economic institutions. We test whether institutions change or persist, whether political and economic institutions tend to co-evolve, and whether changes in political institutions cause changes in economic institutions in the long run. We find that political and economic institutions are non-stationary, suggesting that institutional change is more the norm than the exception. We also find that they tend to co-evolve, although this is less evident for property rights, and that long-run causality runs mainly from political to economic institutions. We illustrate the cross-country evidence with discussions on Indonesia and Chile.

Recent studies of Elinor Ostrom’s work contain contrary accounts of the theoretical role she intended for commitment. For Lewis and Petersen commitment features in Ostrom’s theory only where agents decide on new rules. For Paniagua, however, successful self-organisation requires active self-regulation. There is evidence in Ostrom for each interpretation. She adopts a conception of agency in which incentives are decisive for agents’ choices. Yet Ostrom also observes that the need to resist temptation (and so the need for reflexive alignment of conduct with commitment) is an abiding feature of self-organising communities. This controversy reveals a tension in her work. She presents a stable system as one in which agents are adequately incentivised to carry out positional responsibilities. Yet she appears also to believe that system stability depends on unobserved compliance, moments when agents comply despite the absence of direct incentive. This paper’s purpose is to resolve this tension.

This paper argues that video games – far from being mere entertainment – constitute fully fledged digital institutions. Focusing on massively multiplayer online games, it shows how rule-based environments make institutional processes unusually visible, traceable, and dynamic. Building on post-Northian institutional theory and the 4E cognition framework, the paper advances a socio-cognitive perspective in which institutions are not only systems of rules and incentives but also affective environments. Emotions are shown to play a constitutive role, understood relationally rather than as internal states or institutional properties alone: they shape how agents interpret constraints, coordinate action, and engage in moral evaluation. Through the analysis of violence, reward mechanisms, and governance structures, the paper demonstrates how institutional design organises both behaviour and emotional experience. By foregrounding the affective dimension of institutional life, it contributes to a broader theory of digital institutions in which cognition, interaction, and emotion are tightly integrated.

Firms adapt to institutional environments. They can also help produce them. At regional scale, a firm may need land-use rules, civic infrastructure, or arrangements for regional cooperation that existing institutions cannot supply. This article develops the concept of corporate statecraft: the purposive production of a place’s institutional order by a private organization. Four American cases ground an abductive inquiry: Terman’s Stanford, Miller’s Cummins, the Allegheny Conference’s Pittsburgh, and Long’s American Woolen. They connect institutional deficits to organizational capability, the decision to deploy it outward, and commitments tying future interests to place. The instruments produced establish terms of participation for independent actors; their continuity depends on where resources and authority reside. Extending the Coase–Williamson–North tradition through Langlois’s account of market-supporting capabilities, the article examines how organizations accept reduced control to coordinate beyond their hierarchies. Corporate statecraft reveals the firm’s political nature in the institutional conditions it helps establish for others.

Understanding the determinants of judicial performance is of the utmost importance to promote economic prosperity. The Italian judiciary is notoriously slow, with an estimated backlog of more than three million cases. We use a sample of 652,174 cases from one small claims court in Italy to limit geographical heterogeneity. Despite being generally overlooked by scholarly literature, small claims courts provide justice for a third of the overall civil litigation in Italy. We study the roles of different procedures in judicial timeliness. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in the procedures governing how judges rule on small claims via a regression discontinuity approach. Our estimates reveal that when litigants are required to pay a fee to have their case heard, resolution takes about 5 months longer. We do not find conclusive evidence that when judges are able to rule without providing legal justification, decisions are actually made faster. We document the robustness of these results in light of both selection and observable strategic behavior on the part of litigants. We discuss how our results align with recent policy reforms in the realm of small claims, including methods to ease congestion in Italian courts and efforts to improve judicial performance more broadly.

The aim of this paper is to define the concept of the institutional environment. First, it makes use of the concepts of affordance and physical-behavioural units to define a broader realm, referred to as the action environment. Second, the paper distinguishes two subdomains within the action environment: the domain of realization, which is composed of routinized physical-behavioural units as well as larger action scenarios, and the domain of opportunity, which consists of possible, yet untried, scenarios and is thus free from any routine. Third, the paper discusses a key economic difference between the two: realizations are assigned exclusive property rights, while opportunities constitute a commons. This establishes specific conditions for the institutionalization of an action environment and, consequently, for an institutional environment. The paper will provide an account of how such institutionalization works and its objectives.

This paper investigates the impact of remittances from democratic countries on the political institutions of recipient nations. We argue that the democratic origin of remittances, rather than their aggregate level, is what matters for institutional outcomes. To test this proposition, we analyse a sample of 156 countries from 1970 to 2023, using a novel dataset that distinguishes between remittances from democratic and autocratic source countries. Our instrumental-variable strategy uses common-language exposure to democratic source countries, weighted by inverse bilateral distance and interacted with global trade openness. Results from our analysis and several robustness tests indicate that remittances from democratic countries significantly enhance democratic institutions. While the analysis is global in scope, the findings are particularly relevant to debates on political change in autocratic and weakly democratic regimes.

This paper examines how youth exposure to political repression is associated with long-term trust in public institutions in Chile, drawing on the impressionable years hypothesis. I exploit variation in proximity to pre-1970 military bases as a proxy for local repression intensity. Individuals who were in their critical period (ages 17–25) at the 1973 coup exhibit significantly lower trust in the Carabineros (national police) decades later, with similar effects for those aged 10–16 years. This effect is a relative one: the Carabineros remain the most trusted institution across all cohorts, with exposure creating a persistent trust gap rather than absolute mistrust. Trust in representative institutions (government, presidency) is not significantly affected, indicating institution-specific legacies. Migration, university attendance, and residence in the capital do not account for the results. Early-life exposure to repression is associated with a durable, institution-specific deficit in political trust, underscoring the long shadow of political violence on democratic consolidation.

This article argues that firms organized along republican principles may exhibit comparative epistemic advantages in addressing knowledge distortions associated with arbitrary authority. It brings republican concerns to bear on bounded rationality, knowledge use, and institutional design within firms. The article draws on Friedrich Hayek’s argument that freedom is essential for the effective use of knowledge, interpreting freedom in republican terms as the absence of arbitrary power. Although Hayek applied this insight primarily to market relations, the article extends it to the internal organization of the firm. Hayek’s work thereby becomes a guide to institutional design within firms, understood as the structuring of rules, ownership stakes, and governance arrangements. The argument is diagnostic and propositional; it identifies an epistemic problem associated with managerial authority and advances firm republicanism as a response, drawing on institutional features already partially visible in existing organizational practices.

The 18th century regime of electoral republicanism within nation-states, later rebranded as ‘democracy’, appears to be threatened around the world. To rebuild democracy on sounder bases, theorists and practitioners alike emphasize the value of inclusive and participatory institutions. But how should these institutions be built? This paper presents the results of a deep dive into the forms that inclusion and participation have taken across history and the globe – we refer to them as ‘collective governance’. We describe the methodology used to explore the cases, what the data look like, and some preliminary findings. These findings put pressure on well-known social scientific assumptions about the possibilities and limits of collective governance and present a more fine-grained picture of the conditions that may sustain robust collective governance institutions at scale.

Hybrid and microschools have expanded rapidly in the United States. These models do not fit neatly within existing governance categories, raising questions about how authority, accountability, and decision-making are organised in American education. This paper applies Ostrom’s Institutional Analysis and Development framework, widely used in natural resource and infrastructure governance but rarely applied to education, to compare institutional arrangements in conventional public schools and hybrid schools, where education is co-produced by families and providers. The comparison generates five propositions about how differences in physical arrangements, actors, rule systems, action situations, and accountability mechanisms shape governance outcomes. Hybrid schools exhibit characteristics of polycentric governance that conventional schools largely lack. A section on economic implications examines demand, supply, and information-cost dynamics. The paper concludes that Ostrom’s framework reframes education reform not as a contest between markets and governments but as an evolving search for effective rule systems in a polycentric public economy.

This paper analyses executive discretion under the Antiquities Act of 1906, which gives the President of the United States the unilateral authority to designate national monuments on federal lands. Designations are intended to protect objects of historic or scientific interest and must be confined to the smallest area compatible with their protection. Since 1906, presidents have interpreted the law broadly, designating over 150 monuments, many of which span large areas. Congress and the courts have done little to curb presidential discretion. Using public choice economics, this paper argues that presidents use monument designations to (1) improve electoral prospects for themselves and fellow party members, (2) engage in strategic political exchanges, and (3) enhance their presidential legacy. Several case studies provide evidence that recent presidents have rationally used their broad discretion under the Antiquities Act to improve electoral outcomes, exchange with strategic entities, and bolster their legacy.