• Types of informal local governance institutions

Types of informal local governance institutions

The comparative politics literature, because of its exclusive focus on formal institutions, risks missing many of the “real” incentives and constraints that underlie political behaviour. The authors of this article develop a framework for studying informal institutions and integrating them into comparative institutional analysis.

The framework is based on a typology of four patterns of formal-informal institutional interaction: complementary, accommodating, competing, and substitutive. It explores two issues largely ignored in the literature on this subject:

• the reasons and mechanisms behind the emergence of informal institutions
• the nature of their stability and change

The authors seek to broaden and extend the literature on institutions, with the goal of refining, and ultimately strengthening, its theoretical framework. They suggest several areas for future research, including:

• to posit and test hypotheses about how informal rules shape formal institutional outcomes
• to theorize more rigorously about the emergence of informal institutions and particularly about the mechanisms through which informal rules are created, communicated, and learned
• to better understand the sources of informal institutional stability and change

Comparative politics research on informal institutions is still at an incipient stage. Advances are likely on several fronts, ranging from abstract formal modelling to ethnographic studies to survey research. New insights will come from a variety of disciplines, including anthropology, economics, law, sociology, and political psychology.Hence, the authors conclude, it is essential to promote a broad and pluralistic research agenda that encourages fertilization across disciplines, methods, and regions.

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