Informal Institutions and Historical Institutionalism

Although historical institutionalism has developed a variety of concepts for explaining the mechanisms of endogenous institutional change, existing approaches overlook the potential causal role of informal institutions. The tendency to prioritize formal institutions reflects in part the fact that historical institutionalism grew out of the study of advanced industrial democracies. By contrast, efforts to take informal institutions seriously have derived primarily from research on developing countries and transitional economies where certain types of formal institutions may be less institutionalized than informal ones. The reflexive association of formality with advanced industrial democracies and informality with incomplete development, however, is not only teleological, but misleading. Concepts developed from analyses of endogenous institutional change in varied political economic contexts reveal that the causal mechanisms of institutional transformation are often informal in character. Future research should thus start from the premise that all institutional eco-systems include both formal and informal components, irrespective of regime type, level of development, or geographic region. Such a stance would encourage students to interrogate the origins, the reproduction, and the evolution of informal institutions in interaction with the dynamics derived from the study of formal institutions in historical institutionalism.