It’s been 30 years since the Institutional Grammar (IG) was first introduced as a theoretical concept by Sue Crawford and Elinor Ostrom. Since then, the IG has seen widespread use. Applications of the IG offer methodological refinements and opportunities, demonstrate how it can be applied toward the measurement of a variety of institutional concepts, and illustrate how it is readily paired with a variety of social science models, theories, and frameworks in empirical studies of institutional phenomena. Yet, even with its extensive application and development, much of its original conceptualization remains underexplored. This panel invites papers that revisit fundamental Institutional Grammar topics that have to date received limited attention as a way to energize research on these topics. Potential areas of inquiry include exploring the behavioral theory underlying the IG, delta parameters, differentiating rules, norms, and strategies, pragmatics of the IG, among others.
Ostrom’s institutional grammar provides an analytical framework for identifying different rule-types used in the governance of commons, in other words, it provides a typology of rules for how commons can be regulated. Outside of Ostrom’s institutional grammar, norm typology is also found in particular in legal theory, most famously in Hohfeld’s oft-cited (though less often applied) study of jural relations (1919), while a more recent example is Frändberg’s study of the foundations of legal order (2018). By identifying the formal characteristics of rules in general and of different rule types, such analysis provides standards for the appraisal of particular substantive rules. In particular, Ostrom’s institutional grammar provides an overall framework for apprehending the range of possible rule types in the regulation of commons, as well as design principles derived from empirical studies allowing optimal approaches to commons governance. Ostrom made some reference to Hohfeld’s work, but did not use it extensively or compare her rule types to Hohfeld’s jural relations, while Ostrom’s work has been little cited in legal scholarship. Within literature inspired by Ostrom’s institutional grammar, some authors have suggested adjusting aspects of Östrom’s typology (such as Siddiki et al 2011), while others have not relied on Ostrom’ rule types, instead adopting a considerably more detailed typology of rules (de Moor et al 2016). This paper considers Ostrom’s institutional grammar in light of legal norm typology to assess to what extent the latter might be a basis for critiquing or supplementing Ostrom’s approach.
The last several decades have seen tremendous growth in the use of the Institutional Grammar. During this time, scholarship has revealed the IG's rich theoretical and analytical foundations and operationalized them across a wide array of empirical and simulated cases. Despite these burgeoning applications, there is much about the Grammar that remains unexplored. This paper reviews key conceptual and analytical foundations of the Institutional Grammar, identifying the elements that have received greater and lesser attention in extant research. Using the review as a foundation, the paper then advances a research agenda for institutional analysts interested in advancing Institutional Grammar research based on the IG's under-explored aspects. Finally, the paper discusses how the most recent version of the Institutional Grammar – the Institutional Grammar 2.0 – may be instrumental in carrying out this research.
The Institutional Grammar (IG) is a widely used method for analyzing institutional design, focusing on both the structure and meaning of institutions. While both rules-in-use and rules-in-form are essential for governing common-pool resources and addressing social dilemmas, the IG has primarily been developed to analyze rules-in-form. The complexities of rules-in-use, along with challenges in collecting them, limit the direct application of existing coding protocols designed for rules-in-form. One such challenge is the potential presence of inconsistencies between institutional statements provided by research participants. In this work, we propose a method to address both intra- and inter-participant inconsistencies. We demonstrate how to analyze these discrepancies at both the institutional statement and grammatical element levels, offering strategies for incorporating them into the analysis.
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