Bounding Institutional Authority in Comparative Politics and International Relations

This paper seeks to draw attention to a neglected but essential element of institutions: their boundaries. Boundaries permit actors to organize the world around them into categories and groups and to establish arenas of authority or jurisdiction. Scholars too often assume that boundaries between groups are firm and clear, and assume that these distinctions form the basis for social hierarchies and divisions of labor. However, the nature of boundaries is no less important to institutional operation and social organization than is the fact of their existence. As the first step in a larger research program, we set out to elaborate here not only the importance that the existence of boundaries has in creating and regulating social organization, but also the political significance that the varying nature of boundaries has. We draw on our own work from very different sub-disciplines of political science to highlight what boundaries do and how they vary, as well as to raise a set of theoretical questions to guide further investigation. Our interest in institutional boundaries arose from puzzles arising out of our research. One of us has focused on political parties, and found that despite similar structural conditions, actors responded by creating very different boundaries between political parties and labor unions. The other one of us focuses on international institutional change, and realized that IR theorists’ ability to understand and explain such change largely centers on how they conceptualize the boundaries of key institutions, in particular those of the sovereign state. What we present here is our first effort at laying out the rationale for an investigation of institutional boundaries. We view this paper as the initial step in developing a research program that examines how and why boundaries matter as well as how they arise and change. We conclude by asking whether the nature of boundaries substantially affects the mechanisms of institutional change that are likely to operate. We believe that a study of boundaries can aid institutional analysis in a number of ways. First, institutional analyses have emphasized how institutions create relations of authority; we hope to demonstrate that the bounds of authority, or jurisdiction, are as important to understanding political outcomes. Second, like relations of authority, boundaries or jurisdictions reflect the circumstances in which they are created. As a consequence, boundaries will vary in politically significant ways. We believe that a critical dimension on which boundaries vary is in their permeability. Finally, we propose as subject for further research that this variance is most likely related to particular types of institutional change. We proceed first to discuss how the literature on institutions has neglected the question of boundaries. We suggest that this neglect has shaped current institutionalist accounts of institutional reproduction and change, institutional stability or durability, as well as institutional capacity to shape actors’ behavior. We develop in greater depth how our proposed attention to boundaries can yield a better understanding of institutional reproduction and institutional capacity, as well as institutional change. The new institutionalisms have focused on the authority relations that institutions create rather than their boundaries. Consider, for example, two well-known definitions of institutions from international relations and comparative political economy. Stephen Krasner defines institutions, or—more accurately—“international regimes,” as “sets of implicit or explicit principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actors’ expectations converge in a given area of international relations.” Peter Hall refers to them as “the formal rules, compliance procedures, and standard operating practices that structure the relationship between individuals in various units of the polity and economy.” Both authors emphasize the authoritative and hierarchical aspects of institutions rather than the limits of institutions’ authority, or …