Interests, Institutions, and Mobilization

The readings this week have demonstrated that a discussion of the causal relationship between institutions and behavior is central to understanding political life. To what extent do institutional arrangements influence political behavior? Are certain outcomes inevitable by the very nature of a state’s institutional arrangements? What, in turn, brought about these institutional arrangements, and how do they evolve? Two of the readings, “Institutions,” by Douglass C. North and “What Democracy?” by Richard N. Rosenfeld, present somewhat differing conceptions of the roles institutions and political behavior have in shaping one another.
In “Institutions,” North describes the development of economic institutions as an evolutionary process dependent on the relationship between individuals and their economic environment. As “wealth maximizers,” people will behave in predictable ways: the higher the benefits of cooperation and lower the costs of defection, the more they can be expected to participate in trade. The expansion of trade leads to the need for more sophisticated institutions to lower transaction costs, which in turn encourages more trade. Thus, the history of institutions is for North a materialist one. Each stage of economic development calls for more highly developed institutions. The causal relationship between institutions and behavior, for North, runs both ways. Under this conception of institutional development, self-conscious design of institutional arrangement seems to play no role.
In “What Democracy?” Rosenfeld presents the development of institutions as ideologically driven. Institutional arrangements still have powerful effects on political outcomes – due to disproportional representation, representatives of just 18% of the nation’s population hold a majority in the Senate – but in the case of the United States the institutional arrangements themselves were designed for specific purposes. Hoping to avoid a “tyranny of the majority,” the Founders designed the Senate to be an elite institution. The political reasoning behind disproportional representation in the Senate, Rosenfeld argues, is both antidemocratic and obsolete.
Rosenfeld’s solution is a bold one: abolish the Senate, or at the very least severely limit its powers, rendering the House the dominant legislative body. In so doing, Rosenfeld argues, our government can finally exert the will of the democratic majority. Yet he assumes that rule by the “will of the majority” (incidentally something our professor has asserted doesn’t really exist) is the legitimate aim of government, presupposing this to be the American ideal. This raises an interesting question about the nature of political institutions, and returns us to last week’s discussion of a materialist view of history: Can ideals be responsible for institutional arrangement, or do institutions proceed strictly in a predetermined way from the specific combination of factors present in a state, regardless of what any idealist advocates?