Elinor Ostrom and Sue Crawford, in developing a grammar of institutions, intentionally focused on regulative statements, although they recognized the importance of constitutive statements. In consequence, most empirical applications of the grammar of institutions have largely focused on regulative statements, either omitting or understudying constitutive statements. Not until the development of the institutional grammar 2.0 by Saba Siddiki and Christopher Frantz, did scholars have a grammar for constitutive statements, allowing for the possibility of both statement types to be analyzed, compared, and integrated into a single approach. In this paper, we incorporate constitutive rules into the IAD framework by 1) extending the Ostrom rule typology to encompass constitutive statements, and 2) adding to and revising the components of the action situation to include constitutive statements. The c rule typology provides a classification scheme for constitutive statements like that for regulative statements, or what we label the r rule typology. Constitutive statements create the artifacts and contexts on and in which regulative statements operate. Conceptually, the c rule typology provides a systematic way for aligning related types of constitutive and regulative statements. Empirically, it allows institutional analyses to include the full set of institutional statements present in a rule document, providing more accurate depictions of the design or change of a policy. The c rule typology also requires the revision of the action situation, levels of action, and linked action situations, as constitutive rules bring into existence action situations and artifacts found and used in action situations, which are not currently accounted for. We use both the c and r rule typologies and revised action situations to empirically analyze a set of policies, identifying how constitutive and regulative statements and types interact to create linked action situations, and how the interactions change over time. Our findings showcase the utility of the c rule typology and revised action situations for better capturing institutional designs and understanding processes of institutional change.
In recent years, studies have analyzed governance dynamics taking in weakly institutionalized contexts, for example, by focusing on how stakeholders develop different strategies to participate in policy venues within polycentric systems. Other studies have also shown how collaborative decision-making venues in weakly institutionalized settings face challenges in emerging as the go-to spaces for addressing policy crises. This is particularly salient in the context of environmental governance, where multiple stakeholders with varying degrees of authority and power coexist. However, the empirical evidence surrounding these claims has been limited largely to cross-sectional analysis, with limited work paying attention to the role of participatory venues in facilitating discussions, fostering dialogue, and building consensus regarding policy problems. In this manuscript, we assess the role of one of such venues, the Santa Lucia River Basin committee in Uruguay, from a longitudinal perspective. The Santa Lucia River Basin committee was created in 2013 to foster collaboration and dialogue among a variety of stakeholders involved in water governance related issues in the basin that provides drinking water to 60% of the population of Uruguay. Over the last decade, the basin committee served as a space for debating water governance issues (including, most recently, one of the country’s most intense water crisis in history) and large infrastructure works. Using data from 22 meeting minutes covering a span of ten years, we apply social network analysis techniques to assess hypotheses regarding the interactions among stakeholders participating in the basin committee’s meetings, as well as the role of the committee as a venue for facilitating such interactions. Our study is among the first to provide a longitudinal and quantitative analysis of discursive dynamics within a basin committee in a weakly institutionalized setting. In doing so, we highlight the challenges and opportunities for the development of long-lasting participatory venues for the governance of water resources in weakly institutionalized settings.
Constitutions play a key role in defining the structure, roles, rights, and responsibilities of nation states. Extant research has analyzed how features of constitutional design contribute to the materialization of democratic principles, including the separation of powers (V. Ostrom, 2008; Brinks, Levitsky & Murillo, 2019; Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2019). Recent research applying the Institutional Grammar (IG) highlights the utility of the IG in deciphering how legal concepts are embedded within constitutions (DeMatee, 2023). Nevertheless, systematic use of the IG to characterize how specific characteristics of democracy materialize in constitutional architecture is yet to be developed.
This paper intends to make a twofold contribution to the literature. First, we use the IG 2.0 to understand how features of democracy materialize in Constitutional texts, using the theory of separation of powers as a basis for our analysis. Second, we aim to test, refine, and expand the current characterizations of the constitutive functions proposed by Frantz and Siddiki (2022). As such, we aim to answer a) what types of entities are being constituted in the constitutions of nation states, b) what types of constitutive functions are assigned to said entities, in relation to the principle of separation of powers, and c) whether, and if so how, do these entities and corresponding functions capture the theoretical features of the separation of powers.
To do this, we use a comparative case study approach. We purposefully selected constitutions from six countries, two in North America, two in South America, and two in Europe, to consider different legal traditions (common law and civil law) and regimes to conduct the study. Once identified, we focus on a particular subject of the Constitution, the provisions related to the separation of powers, and code each institutional statement using the IG. We later look for patterns and differences in the way each Constitution captures the idea of separation of powers.
