Institutional Endogeneity

The most general argument in favour of institutional analysis lies in the idea that institutions have to be interpreted by political actors (Lowndes and Roberts 2013). Institutions do not act. Only actors act. What this means is that just as institutions are the result of the actions of actors, so post-institutional outcomes are the result of equivalent actions. In other words, even if institutions have been constructed in a particular way on the basis of very specific preferences, actors still have to work within these institutional structures subsequently. They have to make sense of the institutions that have been set in place. Yet, political actors, like all humans, are imperfect, occasionally irrational, and at least sometimes self-interested.

As we presented the problem of institutional endogeneity above, we assumed that the preferences of the institutional designers were clear and that institutional structures perfectly reflected their preferences. This is hardly likely to be the case. There are times when institutional choice may the result of a collective decision, perhaps in the context of a first post-independence constitution. In this case, the preferences underpinning institutions may not necessarily be clear at all. We can also imagine the situation where constitutions are passed very quickly and in very turbulent circumstances (Andrews and Jackman 2005). Again, here, there may be much less deliberation involved, suggesting that institutions do not reflect carefully selected preferences. Put formally, actors may have incomplete information on which to base their post-institutional preference ordering (Shvetsova 2003). More than that, we might wish to assume that competing preferences cancel each other out at the point of constitutional choice. If so, then institutions can be treated as stand-alone entities with rules that shape subsequent behaviour independently. In the case study chapters, we focused on the most long-standing constitutions in the countries in question. However, there were plenty of examples in the immediate post-independence years when constitutions were drawn up very hurriedly. True, some of these interim or stop-gap constitutions still reflected the preferences of the most recent power-holder, but there were occasions when decision-making seemed more ad hoc, when laws were passed at short notice to regularize a certain legal situation. Often, these interim constitutions formed the basis of future documents. In short, there were circumstances in which it might be reasonable to treat institutional features as having an independent