Work in progress
Some regard institutions as solutions to collective action problems; others as ideological tools for oppression. Here I discuss how these perspectives can be usefully combined into an ameliorative framework. I propose that the function of institutions is to promote cooperation. By this, I mean that the cooperative benefits that they generate explain why they persist. But it can be that, in spite of such perceived benefits, they are in fact unjust or otherwise disvaluable. And perhaps (more) valuable alternatives exist. Such situations call for social change. To see how this works, I first ask what institutions are and I propose that they are social norms that govern social practices. Furthermore, a social norm governs a social practice if it non-trivially increases the motivation of the participants to comply with it. Crucially, those who comply with a social norm often do so in part because they regard them as legitimate. But they can be mistaken about this. This is why social change requires raising awareness. However, as cooperation is a collective action problem, activation and assurance are also crucial ingredients. The final element is a clear, stable and valuable alternative.
My paper examines the history of pre-modern institutions in Britain (where the word 'institution' was an early eighteenth-century innovation). The pre-modern state (like many transition countries today) relied extensively on hybrid public-private institutions, to the extent that the dividing line between them was often very unclear. Britain's empire in Asia, for example, was outsourced to a part-private, part-public East India Company. Such institutions were particularly prone to corruption - especially as a result of conflicts of interest, and vague, ambiguous or rudimentary statements of purpose - and difficult to regulate. Even so, even before the coming of democracy, greater accountability and oversight was gradually developed, and the boundary between public and private became clearer. This protracted separation of public and private - the result of a variety of factors examined in the paper - helped to foster the idea of corruption as the abuse of public office for private gain.
Popular attitudes about democracy are viewed as critical for its consolidation and survival. We investigate the effect of comparisons on the formation of these attitudes. Comparator regimes – across time and space – can serve as “democratic benchmarks” that influence people’s evaluations of what are the essential features of democracy, whether their own government is democratic, and whether they are satisfied with democracy as it is practiced where they live. We plan to administer two survey experiments that investigate the effect of comparisons on popular attitudes towards democracy in states across the United States. By asking respondents directly about state-level democracy, we first seek to make a descriptive contribution – one that will enable us to compare perceptions of democracy at the subnational level with objective measures of it. We also seek to provide causal evidence on whether comparisons affect popular attitudes about democracy.
In this presentation, I utilize the concept of transaction, originally formulated by John Commons, to demonstrate that the transaction serves as the fundamental unit of analysis for understanding institutions (as defined by Douglass North). Institutions encompass both formal and informal constraints that humans devise to shape behaviours and influence political, economic, and social domains and outcomes. In order to comprehend the functioning of institutions, it is crucial to consider various aspects, such as legal, political, competitive, and hierarchical factors. All of these aspects are covered within the transactional framework. A trans-action represents an action that can trans-fer or move a resource (e.g., a widget) from one transactor (e.g., a user) to another transactor (e.g., another user) within a setting that consists of three dimensions. First, the vertical dimension involves two transactors positioned at different levels of the supply-and-demand chain, such as a seller and a buyer. Second, the horizontal dimension encompasses transactors operating at the same level of the chain, such as two competing sellers. Lastly, the authoritative dimension focuses on the relationships between private transactors (e.g., a seller and a buyer) and a trusted third party or public official, who ensures uniformity in transactors’ expectations and guarantees perfect coordination of the entitlements of all transactors. By considering these three dimensions, we can gain insights into several aspects: (i) the significance of behavioural constraints in terms of opportunity costs, (ii) the differentiation between formal and informal institutions (including a firm’s hierarchy as originally portrayed by Ronald Coase and after developed by Oliver Hart, and Oliver Williamson’s idea of fundamental transformation), and (iii) the human nature of institutions, also known as the political economy of institutions.
This paper develops a framework for conceptualising institutions' action and agency, for the purpose of attributing obligations and responsibility to institutions. Importantly, the proposed framework is neutral between public and private institutions. Indeed, the paper's framework suggests a strong analogy between the agency of corporations and the agency of liberal-democratic states. The paper responds to objections to this analogy.
The paper analyzes the internal structure of institutional action. Institutions are broadly conceptualized as structures of interrelated embodied rule-based roles. The paper explores the possibility to develop a conceptualization of such a structure that makes sense of the working of both public and non-public institutions (with a special focus on private firms). The exploration runs along one main scalar property of institutional action: its being more or less open-textured. This is an important property to understand how an institution works because it shapes the kind of rules for power exercise and the practices of accountability between institutional role occupants. The paper’s conclusion is that a conceptualization of the architecture of institutional action across sectors is possible and promising to the extent that the internal structure of public and non-public institutions can be aligned along the same axe of “open-texturedness,” thus emphasizing the internal reflective dynamics of officeholders’ interactions.
Anticorruption in public institutions prominently questions the justification of instruments of hard and criminal law. Such instruments are mainly regulative and punitive of individual officeholders’ actions. The legal measures to identify and punish corrupt public officeholders are many. However, corruption is still widespread across public institutions. A source of resistance to legal measures comes from public officeholders’ corrupt dispositions, which sustain a creeping institutional leniency towards corruption. To appreciate how public officeholders’ dispositions may curb anticorruption measures we introduce and develop the notion of the “corrupted mindset.” The notion helps to make sense of how and why public officeholders’ formal compliance with anticorruption measures may co-exist with their using or condoning the use of public power in an ethically questionable way. This sense requires taking a reflective stance on the rationale behind public officeholders’ conduct as an interrelated group of agents. We thus offer a novel philosophical perspective on anticorruption rooted in an institutional ethics of office accountability.
The growing literature in anti-corruption studies is based on a priori acceptance of deviation from democratically established institutions and a violation of social contract transferring the public power in an entrusted quality. While these conceptual and normative frameworks may well function for analysing well-established democracies, it creates paradoxes for non-democracies.
Institutions in non-democratic regimes are not established democratically and they do not work based on the principles of the rule of law, transparency, and accountability. In those settings, public power and resources are captured/stolen or seized by non-democratic means in most cases (single man/dominant party/military regimes). There are other polities where the opportunities of representative democracy are utilized for demolishing the fundamentals of liberal democracy (hybrid regimes).
Particularistic distribution of public resources by the regimes and social consent produced by moral and cultural codes make corruption a norm rather than an exception.
This paper proposes a new search for a conceptual and methodological framework that may analyse the phenomenon and develop remedies to combat political corruption in non-democratic regimes.
Philanthropy stands at a conflictual position when it comes to its relationship with democracy. The point of juncture, and therefore the source of their opposition, is that these two forms of collective decision-making aim at the same ends: public purposes. But if many scholars have discussed the normative question of why philanthropy might or might not be desirable in a democracy, few have paused to address the prior and more fundamental analytical question of what makes philanthropy inherently specific. The potential danger that philanthropy might bring to democracy is generally described in consequentialists terms. Contrary to that, I argue that this conflictual relation is less related to its consequences and more connected to the way philanthropy is exercised. The way one can derive authority from gratuitous donations will always be incompatible with democratic credentials. On one hand, democratic decisions will apply jointly over each citizen while instantiating a direct relation of accountability between them. On the other hand, philanthropic acts allow individuals to influence the public by their own preferences. I offer a political definition of philanthropy as acts carrying a form of authority characterized by three individually necessary but jointly sufficient constitutive rules. This authority is unilaterally casted, rather than being mutually exercised; 2) philanthropy’s authority takes its normativity from a mix of first and third personality, appealing to reasons for actions that are not linked to any relations of claim-rights that decision-makers may have between them. Therefore, philanthropy's authority is extraneous to the right-based forms of mutual accountability that typically underpin liberal democratic decision-making. And finally, 3) the currency of these organizations, what materializes their actual action-power, is external to the decision-making process rather than being internally created, as in one-head one-vote systems. By “currency,” I mean the resources through which any authority-wielding agent can contribute to a decision-making process. Ultimately, this conceptual analysis will help at refining our understanding of the philanthropy/democracy relationship as well as better frame the normative debate that revolve around these two tools of decision-making.
Concepts referring to political phenomena do not float in a vacuum; they are rooted into political contexts. Whenever political contexts change, such changes can strain the relevance of political concepts to analyze and understand political phenomena, thus requiring adaptations.
Take the concept of political corruption. Within contemporary democracies, it has adapted from indicating the use of public power for private gain (e.g., bribery) to referring to broader unaccountable uses of power of office (e.g., nepotism; state capture). There are also adaptations across cultures (e.g., bribes vs. gifts) and times (e.g., familism). Such changes suggest the need of a methodological reflection on conceptual adaptations. Such adaptations are particularly interesting when they aim to improve the fittingness and explanatory capacity of political concepts referring to political phenomena. In such cases, conceptual adaptations may count as a form of conceptual progress.
Our methodological reflection uses the toolkit of analytical philosophy. By resorting to conceptual analysis, analytical philosophy has traditionally reflected on the definition of concepts and on their improvement vis-à-vis reality and reality changes. Conceptual analysis has departed from rigid concept designation, based on necessary and sufficient conditions, to broader methodological flexibility. Such a methodological evolution has recently gone under the heading of “conceptual engineering” (Cappelen 2018).
We explore the prospect of integrating conceptual engineering within the methodological toolkit of normative political theory. To do so, we concentrate on the concept of political corruption as a case in point. We build on a broad conceptualization of political corruption as a “deficit of office accountability” (Ceva & Ferretti 2021). So conceptualized, political corruption refers to (mis)uses of public power by officeholders acting on mandates conferred upon them by a legitimate public authority in a democratic polity. This concept may struggle to adapt to non-democratic polities (e.g., authoritarian or hybrid regimes), or when political action expands to the non-public sector (e.g., non-profit organizations). Our discussion aims to identify a core of the concept of corruption as a deficit of office accountability that may survive the adaption to such contextual changes, and to assess whether we can improve its fittingness and explanatory capacity with the methodology of conceptual engineering.
Besides contributing to refine the methodology of corruption studies in political theory, we also offer some general indications on how contextualization may strain analytical methodologies in the field and thus motivate the quest for conceptual progress.