Jenna Bednar
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780262035385
- eISBN:
- 9780262337717
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262035385.003.0010
- Subject:
- Economics and Finance, History of Economic Thought
Institutions are designed to alter human behavior. To remain effective over time, institutions need to adapt to changes in the environment or the society the institution is meant to regulate. Douglas ...
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Institutions are designed to alter human behavior. To remain effective over time, institutions need to adapt to changes in the environment or the society the institution is meant to regulate. Douglas North referred to this property as adaptive efficiency and suggested the need for a model of how institutions change to remain effective. This essay contributes to a theory of adaptive efficiency by relating it to the burgeoning literature in robust system design. It reviews five models of institutional change, paying particular attention to each model’s ability to explain institutional adaptation. It isolates three common structural features of a robust, adaptive institutional system: diversity, modularity, and redundancy. It illustrates the theory with a brief application to federal systems, and closes by describing some open research questions relating to institutional adaptive efficiency.Less
Institutions are designed to alter human behavior. To remain effective over time, institutions need to adapt to changes in the environment or the society the institution is meant to regulate. Douglas North referred to this property as adaptive efficiency and suggested the need for a model of how institutions change to remain effective. This essay contributes to a theory of adaptive efficiency by relating it to the burgeoning literature in robust system design. It reviews five models of institutional change, paying particular attention to each model’s ability to explain institutional adaptation. It isolates three common structural features of a robust, adaptive institutional system: diversity, modularity, and redundancy. It illustrates the theory with a brief application to federal systems, and closes by describing some open research questions relating to institutional adaptive efficiency.
Jenna Bednar
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781479868858
- eISBN:
- 9781479821303
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479868858.003.0008
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory
This chapter explains how subsidiarity boosts the adaptive efficiency of federal systems. The process of adaptation involves pushing federalism's boundaries in search of improved national-state ...
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This chapter explains how subsidiarity boosts the adaptive efficiency of federal systems. The process of adaptation involves pushing federalism's boundaries in search of improved national-state balance as well as selecting beneficial changes and rejecting harmful ones, a job that requires a set of diverse, complementary safeguards. This chapter first describes the model of federal robustness before discussing the two roles of subsidiarity: policy subsidiarity and safeguard subsidiarity. It then considers how policy subsidiarity and safeguard subsidiarity each contributes to the process of constitutional adaptation and the robustness of federal systems. It highlights two key aspects of adaptation where the contribution of subsidiarity is evident: experimentation and selection.Less
This chapter explains how subsidiarity boosts the adaptive efficiency of federal systems. The process of adaptation involves pushing federalism's boundaries in search of improved national-state balance as well as selecting beneficial changes and rejecting harmful ones, a job that requires a set of diverse, complementary safeguards. This chapter first describes the model of federal robustness before discussing the two roles of subsidiarity: policy subsidiarity and safeguard subsidiarity. It then considers how policy subsidiarity and safeguard subsidiarity each contributes to the process of constitutional adaptation and the robustness of federal systems. It highlights two key aspects of adaptation where the contribution of subsidiarity is evident: experimentation and selection.
