Colonialism and Institutional Persistence: Mixed Legislative Legacies in Ghana and Kenya

A large literature investigates the institutional legacies of European colonialism around the world. However, in linking contemporary outcomes to colonial antecedents, most works seldom identify specific institutions or their temporal evolution. This paper examines the institutional legacies of colonialism in Africa through the lens of colonial legislatures. Cross-country analyses show that the correlation between colonial antecedents and contemporary measures of legislative strength is tenuous and sensitive to measurement. A comparative study of legislative development in Ghana and Kenya explains the mixed legacies of colonial legislatures. Beyond colonial institutional design, temporal variation in intra-legislative factional politics explains legislative development in the two countries. This article highlights the importance of understanding the specific mechanisms behind colonial institutional persistence and change.

Making the Paris Agreement: Historical Processes and the Drivers of Institutional Design

After a decade-long search, countries finally agreed on a new climate treaty in 2015. The Paris Agreement has attracted attention both for overcoming years of gridlock and for its novel features. Here, we build on accounts explaining why states reached agreement, arguing that a deeper understanding requires a focus on institutional design. Ultimately, it was this agreement, with its specific provisions, that proved acceptable to states rather than other possible outcomes. Our account is multi-causal and draws methodological inspiration from the public policy and causes of war literatures. Specifically, we distinguish between background, intermediate, and proximate conditions and identify how they relate to one another, jointly producing the ultimate outcome we observe. Our analysis focuses especially on the role of scientific knowledge, non-state actor mobilization, institutional legacies, bargaining, and coalition-building in the final push for agreement. This case-based approach helps to understand the origins of Paris, but also offers a unique, historically grounded way to examine questions of institutional design.

Industrial Legacies and Germany’s Specialization in Customization

This chapter traces how entrants from legacy industries in Germany used public resources originally intended to support technological innovation in traditional sectors such as machine tools and automobile supplies. It explains why, even in new sectors such as wind and solar, German firms reproduced historical patterns of flexible specialization, customization, and small-batch production. The chapter begins with a discussion of industrial origins of Germany’s wind and solar firms, focusing in particular on machine tools, automation, and automotive sectors. It then outlines the learning process that firms navigated in pivoting from their existing industries into new industrial sectors. The second half of the chapter focuses on the two key resources that enabled these developments: collaboration with China and domestic institutional legacies.

Politics of the Blessed Lady: Catholic Art in the Contemporary Hungarian Culture Industry

I examine Hungary’s Catholic arts industry and its material practices of cultural production: the institutions and professional disciplines through which devotional material objects move as they become embedded in political processes of national construction and contestation. Ethnographic data come from thirty-six months of fieldwork in Hungary and Transylvania, and focuses on three museum and gallery exhibitions of Catholic devotional objects. Building on critiques of subjectivity- and embodiment-focused research, I highlight how the institutional legacies of state socialism in Hungary and Romania inform a national politics of Catholic materiality. Hungarian cultural institutions and intellectuals have been drawn to work with Catholic art because Catholic material culture sustains a meaningful presence across multiple scales of political contestation at the local, regional, and state levels. The movement of Catholic ritual objects into the zone of high art and cultural preservation necessitates that these objects be mobilized for use within the political agendas of state-embedded institutions. Yet, this mobilization is not total. Ironies, confusions, and contradictions continue to show up in Transylvanian Hungarians’ historical memory, destabilizing these political uses.

The Ainu and Indigenous politics in Japan: negotiating agency, institutional stability, and change

In April 2019, the Japanese government officially legally recognized the Ainu as Indigenous people. Building on an institutionalist framework, the paper suggests that a phenomenon of institutional layering has taken place, resulting in tensions between the desire to preserve the legitimacy of old institutions and the pressure to develop more progressive policies. To explain this process, policy legacies, and institutional opportunities are relevant. First, the narrative that equality can be attained through assimilation, and the political construction of the “Ainu problem” as a regional one tied to Hokkaido pervade political imaginaries and institutions. Second, institutional opportunities have mediated the ways activists have sought to make their voices heard in the political arena. A focus on key historical segments illuminates the difficulty for activists to penetrate high-level political arenas while indicating the importance of agency, ties and interests in explaining major reforms and their limitations. The ambiguity that characterizes current policy framework points to the potential leverage that this policy configuration represents for the Ainu. At the same time, historical and institutional legacies that have shaped Indigenous politics continue to constrain, to a great extent, the possibilities for meaningful and transformative developments for the Ainu.

Secession and Secessionist Movements

Secession and secessionists movements have proliferated since the end of the Second World War. The academic literature has extensively explored these movements from different aspects. To begin, scholars have developed several legal approaches to explain when and if so how secession should take place, resulting in debates about the normative basis and legality of self-determination. Normative and philosophical approaches have sought to establish a number of necessary preconditions for secession. States, according to some of these authors, should allow secession to happen when they believe that it is morally and practically acceptable. The political economy of secession and secessionist movements has been another key area of research. Debates among scholars in this area have focused on whether wealthy or poor regions are more or less likely to pursue secession, how the presence of oil resources may establish more opportunities for the groups to secede along with incentives for the state to hold onto the territory, and what role state capacity and movement capabilities play in secessionist dynamics. Scholars have also emphasized economic approaches to the study of secession that highlight the costs and benefits of staying in the union compared to seceding. Others have studied secessionism from an international perspective and have particularly focused on exploring the impact of external kin on secessionist movements and on why and how self-determination movements obtain international recognition. International approaches have also explored the roles of ethnic ties and vulnerability in stimulating and curbing secessionist movements. Other scholars have focused on institutional approaches by exploring how different domestic and international institutions have shaped secessionist conflicts. In particular, research in this area has explored the relationship between democracy and secession, institutional legacies, and the role of autonomy and lost autonomy on separatism. Scholars have also examined the strategic choices and behaviors used by both secessionist groups (violence vs. nonviolence) and by states (concession and repression), and relatedly how reputational concerns for resolve and setting precedents shape state behavior toward secessionists. Some research shows that most states are more likely to fight against secessionist movements than to grant them concessions, particularly states facing multiple (potential) separatists. However, other scholars have challenged these claims, and shown that states can use organizational lines to grant some concessions to secessionist groups without damaging their reputations. Looking toward solutions, some scholars have emphasized institutional solutions, such as consociationalism, and still others have looked to international organizations to resolve secessionist conflicts, while skeptics have suggested that approaches like partition are often the only way forward. Finally, there are several new datasets for studying secession and secessionist movements, including All Minorities at Risk (AMAR), Family EPR, SDM, and others.

Islamic Finance and Development in Malaysia

From a historical perspective, Islamic economic institutions have not been conducive to capital accumulation in Muslim societies (Kuran 2004, 2011). This has been further hampered by a lack of trust among different faith communities, where Muslims were historically charged higher interest rates by non-Muslim financiers (Kuran and Rubin 2018). Despite these institutional legacies, Islamic banking and finance has grown rapidly in the Muslim world over the past few decades. In some countries, Islamic finance is no longer considered a niche field, as the total volume of halal exchanges constitute a substantial share in the overall amount of financial transactions. This chapter focuses on the role of Islamic finance in development and argues that this relationship is further influenced by the conditions under which private money creation occurs. In particular, the case of Malaysia is a good example that showcases how the building of market institutions is not enough to stimulate equitable development: while an extensive network of Islamic finance institutions attract domestic and international investors, much of the loans extended by these banks finance real-estate and consumer-durables purchases. Islamic banks are less willing to extend credit to small and medium-sized businesses on the grounds of perceived high risk. The key beneficiaries of the Islamic financial industry are large financial corporations that raise capital via issuing Islamic equity, and governments that diversify their debt composition using shariʿa-compliant bills and bonds.