Institutional Grammar: Foundations and Applications for Institutional Analysis

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the Institutional Grammar, an approach for analyzing the design of institutions. To lay the foundation for the application of the Grammar for different application areas, the book first provides a background of the IG, before motivating the introduction of an updated version of the Institutional Grammar, called the Institutional Grammar 2.0 that aims at representing institutions more comprehensively and with greater validity. The book then turns to applications and introduces methodological guidance alongside expositions of emerging analytical applications of the “Grammar” that include presentations of current practice, as well as developing novel analytical opportunities that the analyst can apply or build upon for their application. This book is aimed at students, faculty, and practitioners of diverse disciplinary backgrounds with varying levels of understanding of institutional analysis and experience conducting it.

Christopher K. Frantz is Associate Professor of Computational Social Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway. His work focuses on computational approaches to institutional analysis, with specific focus on agent-based modelling techniques. A particular interest lies in analyzing socio-institutional phenomena in artificial societies, including their emergence and lifecycle dynamics, as well as establishing explanatory linkages to the underlying behavioral processes. A conceptual refinement of his work was the systematic introduction of nesting principles into the Institutional Grammar aimed at improving the Grammar’s conceptual validity to represent institutions of arbitrary type and complexity.

Saba Siddiki is Associate Professor of Public Administration and International Affairs at Syracuse University, USA. Her research focuses on institutional design, particularly, policy design. She studies the structure/content of policy design as well asthe behavioral and policy implications of policy design. In connection with research foci, she has been involved in the theoretical and methodological advancement of the Institutional Grammar. She has specifically focused on empirically validating how the Institutional Grammar can be used to operationalize various policy relevant theoretical constructs and expanding the syntactic structure upon which the Institutional Grammar is based.