The Neoinstitutionalist Framework in Turbulent Settings: Does It Work?
Does NI provide an adequate toolkit for understanding conflict and change in countries with high levels of instability and where “noise” is stronger than institutional signaling? I think not. I will not dispute that in such countries “institutions matter”–an assertion that is trivially true (Harris, Hunter and Lewis 1995)–nor that a broad family of social and political problems can be captured by the rich conceptual framework of NI. I start instead with the defense of the (once again, very conventional) claim that such matters as contemporary political change in Colombia, Ecuador or Venezuela cannot be accounted for by standard NI.5 I believe there is a fundamental difference, from the point of view of the role and status of institutions in social and political life, between those turbulent Andean cases and the core capitalist countries. a. My main defense of the conventional claim is based on the fact that in a very important sense countries like Colombia, Perú or Venezuela fit too
