Institutional Grammar 2.0: A specification for encoding and analyzing institutional design
| Published date | 01 June 2021 |
| Author | Christopher K. Frantz,Saba Siddiki |
| Date | 01 June 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12719 |
SYMPOSIUM ARTICLE
Institutional Grammar 2.0: A specification for
encoding and analyzing institutional design
Christopher K. Frantz
1
| Saba Siddiki
2
1
Department of Computer Science (IDI),
Norwegian University of Science and
Technology (NTNU), Gjøvik, Norway
2
Department of Public Administration and
International Affairs, Syracuse University,
Syracuse, New York, USA
Correspondence
Saba Siddiki, Department of Public
Administration and International Affairs,
Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York,
USA.
Email: ssiddiki@syr.edu
Funding information
National Science Foundation, Grant/Award
Number: 1917908
Abstract
Public affairs scholars have contributed rich insights on the
role and outcomes of institutions in policy and administra-
tive settings. They have offered numerous empirical studies
of these topics, alongside concepts and theories that can be
leveraged in their assessment. But there remains a relative
dearth in attention to approaches that can be used to sup-
port rigorous assessments of institutional design itself—
those that support reliable and nuanced representations of
institutional structure and meaning. The Institutional Gram-
mar (IG) is one such approach that has gained in prominence
over the last decade. Existing applications validate the IG's
utility toward rigorous assessments of institutional design,
and highlight the IG's value in operationalizing concepts rel-
evant in policy and administration scholarship. We build on
existing IG research by presenting a revised specification IG
2.0 for encoding and analyzing institutional design that
responds to representational necessities and analytical
opportunities within and beyond policy and administrative
domains.
1|INTRODUCTION
Institutional analysis—the study of formal and informal rules, norms, and strategies that govern behavior—isof endur-
ing interest to public policy and administration scholars. Institutional analysis has been leveraged to investigate ques-
tions central to these fields; for example, what informs individual and collective decision making in policy and
administrative domains, how are policymaking arenas and administrative domains structured, and how is the produc-
tion and provision of public goods and services organized? Approaching such questions from an institutional perspec-
tive draws attention to the structure and meaning of institutions that constitute, or otherwise parameterize, features
of institutionally governed domains, as well as to how specifically they opportune or constrain behavior therein.
Received: 31 March 2020 Revised: 5 September 2020 Accepted: 23 December 2020
DOI: 10.1111/padm.12719
222 © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Public Admin. 2021;99:222–247.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/padm
Institutional analysis is thus necessarily dependent on the ability to robustly and reliably represent the structure and
meaning of institutions. This paper presents innovations to an analytical approach which is increasingly used within
public policy and administration studies for this objective, called the Institutional Grammar (IG).
The IG is a theoretically grounded analytical approach for assessing the syntactic structure andassociated mean-
ing of directives comprising institutions—such as public policies, administrative regulations, and social norms—and
resultant behavioral outcomes. These directives are called “institutional statements”under the IG. Institutional state-
ments regulate actions for actors within the presence or absence of particular constraints, or constitute or otherwise
parameterize features of systems in which actors interact. Following this characterization, a revised version of the
IG, as introduced in this article, considers institutional language expressed in statements of both regulative and con-
stitutive kind. Recognizing both distinct characteristics as well as overlapping conceptions of the latter, the revised
IG is comprised of syntactic components that are variably configured to reflect statements of both regulative and
constitutive form under the umbrella of an integrated syntax and associated semantics.
Over the last decade, the IG has been increasingly applied in various institutional domains, or settings governed
by sets of formal and informal institutions. Research published over this period addresses the integrity of the IG syn-
tax (Schlüter & Theesfeld, 2010), highlights its applicability within computational modeling of institutional emergence
and outcomes emerging from institutionally governed behavior (Frantz et al., 2015; Smajgl et al., 2008), and offers
operational coding guidelines for applying the IG to study policy design (Basurto et al., 2010; Siddiki et al., 2011). But
while its application showcases the IG's promise for supporting institutional analysis, it also reveals its limitations.
Foremost, it highlights ontological inconsistencies of the IG syntax that challenge conceptual and operational distinc-
tion among syntactic components, and the limited ability to capture institutional configurations comprehensively,
both with respect to structural depth, as well as the inattention to constitutive institutions, the relevance of which
has been noted by scholars (Weible & Carter, 2015).
We respond to the noted limitations with a revised IG specification, termed Institutional Grammar 2.0 (IG 2.0),
which we contrast hereafter with the “base IG syntax.”This refined specification (i) introduces modifications to the
base IG syntax to resolve ontological inconsistencies observed therein, (ii) presents a novel syntactical form for con-
stitutive institutional statements, recognizing that the base IG syntax primarily accords with regulative institutional
statements, and (iii) enhances the tractability of IG coded data for broader application domains and associated com-
putational applications (e.g., natural language processing, agent-based modeling). The refined specification orients
around three levels of expressiveness, with each level of expressiveness identifying a distinctive parsingof regulative
and constitutive syntactic components common across all levels: IG Core, IG Extended, and IG Logico. The granular-
ity with which syntactic components are parsed at each level of expressiveness has implications for how human
readable coded texts are, the computational tractability of coded data, and logical consistency of parsed data. Ana-
lyses can be designed to selectively encode at different levels of expressiveness, that is, varying levels of detail, to
support the investigation of different types of research questions in correspondence to the applied analytical
methods and techniques, thereby supporting the IG's theoretical and methodological versatility. To capture institu-
tional complexity more systematically, the revised specification also accommodates identification and analysis of
inter- and intra-statement relationships based on a nested institutional statement conception (Frantz et al., 2013).
Altogether, the IG 2.0 facilitates accurate and comprehensive representations of institutional structure and meaning,
central to the conduct of institutional analysis in policy, administrative, and other domains.
In the remainder of this paper, we offer a brief introduction to the IG, provide an elaborated rationale for the IG
2.0, and give a detailed overview of the key features of IG 2.0.
2|INTRODUCTION TO THE INSTITUTIONAL GRAMMAR
Scholars of public affairs, and cognate fields, express an enduring interest in the institutions that govern behavior
(March & Olsen, 1989; North, 1990; Pierson, 2000; Williamson, 2000). Institutions, defined here as the explicit or
FRANTZ AND SIDDIKI 223
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