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The competition and evolution of ideas in the public sphere: a new foundation for institutional theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 February 2018

BRENDAN MARKEY-TOWLER Open the ORCID record for BRENDAN MARKEY-TOWLER [Opens in a new window]
BRENDAN MARKEY-TOWLER*
Affiliation:
School of Economics, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
*
*Email: brendan.markeytowler@uqconnect.edu.au
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Abstract

This paper advances and defends the proposition that the basis for the evolution of institutions is the evolution and competition of ideas in the public sphere. This is based on a deeper proposition that institutions are ideas and ideas become institutions. We draw on the ‘Brisbane School’ of evolutionary/institutional economics and of behavioural/psychological economics to investigate the microdynamics of the competition of ideas in the public sphere, which has been studied at a macroscopic level by Isabel Almudi, Francisco Fatas-Villafranca and Jason Potts. The theory we develop gives us a new vision of institutional evolution as emerging from the microdynamics of the evolution and competition of ideas in the public sphere, and a new foundation for institutional theory. It gives us a new vision of the microdynamics of institutional evolution, the evolutionary fitness of ideas for competition in the public sphere and the likely path of institutional evolution.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Institutional Economics , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , February 2019 , pp. 27 - 48
Copyright
Copyright © Millennium Economics Ltd 2018 

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