The development of political institutions : : power, legitimacy, democracy / / Federico Ferrara.

• Superior document: Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies
• Author: Ferrara, Federico.
• Place / Publishing House: Ann Arbor, Michigan : : University of Michigan Press,, 2022.; ©2022
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Series: Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (217 pages)

"While the literature on "new institutionalism" explains the stability of institutional arrangements within countries and the divergence of paths of institutional development between countries, Federico Ferrara improves upon existing explanations of the development of political institutions, taking a "historical institutionalist" approach to theorize dynamic processes of institutional reproduction, institutional decay, and institutional change. With regard to each of these outcomes, Ferrara synthesizes "power-based" or "power-distributional" explanations and "ideas-based" "legitimation explanations." Among his more significant contributions, he specifies the psychological "microfoundations" of processes of institutional development, drawing heavily from the findings of experimental psychology to ensure that the explanation is grounded in clear and realistic assumptions regarding human motivation, cognition, and behavior. Aside from being of interest to scholars and graduate students in political science and other social-scientific disciplines whose research concentrates on the genesis of political institutions, their evolution over time, and/or their impact on the stability of political order and the quality of governance, the book may feature as required reading in graduate courses and seminars in comparative politics where the study of institutions and their development ranks among the subfield's most important subjects."

Table of Contents

Institutional Development: The Dynamics of Power and (De)legitimation -- Institutional Reproduction: Path Dependence and the Dynamic Stability of Politics--Institutional Decay: The Logic of Self-Undermining Processes--Institutional Change: The Incremental Logic of Political Development -- Institutional Engineering: The Purposive Design of Political Institutions.