Drawing upon findings from an Imagining America research project funded by the Mellon Foundation (2019–2023), this research paper and manifesto proposes five critical ways in which institutions of higher education can better support public humanities. Through over one hundred individual interviews, twenty multimedia case studies, a national graduate scholar survey, an online study group, and public conversations, we learned how public scholars have consistently conducted research that matters – responding to urgent challenges in the world, including on the pressing ecological, social, racial, and economic justice issues of our time. However, the diverse inter-generational Imagining America (IA) research team also found that most academic institutions are still not designed to support this important work. By favoring narrow disciplinary boundaries and norms and individualized methods over collective commitments and reciprocal partnerships, most institutions marginalize and disincentivize public humanities. Our research respondents overwhelmingly agreed that instead of change initiatives led from the top of the university, publicly engaged scholars themselves lead the way by virtue of their groundbreaking collaborative, relational, reflective, critical yet hopeful grounded research. The manifesto shared at the end of the paper proposes how to support this important work today.

Although crises provide an opportunity for meaningful institutional change, the results often fall short of expectations because the reforms undertaken are informed by top-down, global-standard blueprints and fail to consider the informal, long-established, functionally credible institutions that exist at the local level. Seeking to explore how the interplay between formal and informal institutions can affect institutional change, the study focuses on Stagiates, a small community that has been struggling for more than 10 years against the uniform implementation of the 2010 administrative reform (prescribed in light of the Greek government-debt crisis), which threatens to dismantle their 350-year-old, functionally credible commons. To this end, the paper uses case study methodology, Historical-Institutional Analysis and Ostrom's Social-Ecological System framework. It concludes by emphasising the need for institutional analysis and policy to look more closely at the dynamic and complex dialectic between formal and informal institutions and the role that community needs, norms and values play in meaningful institutional change, paying due attention (as original institutionalism did) to the informality and the function-based social credibility of institutions.

Haveman, Joseph-Goteiner, and Li's (2023) perspective article contributes important insights into China's transition away from central planning and redistribution toward greater market coordination of economic exchange. In our commentary on their insightful article, we build on and extend their arguments in three main ways. First, we discuss how future studies might extend the authors’ work by leveraging the ‘messiness’ of institutional change to explore the cross-level dynamics involved in transforming institutional logics. Second, we build on the authors’ call for more historically grounded, contextualized research on institutional logics to argue that the conditions surrounding logic emergence have important implications for inter-logic dynamics and organizational responses. Third, we build on the authors’ suggestions for future research to underscore the broader consequences of institutional logics and their potential to perpetuate or exacerbate social inequalities and other societal challenges.

This article deals with the impact of intra-party transformations and access to power on the visions of political participation of activists taking part in populist anti-establishment parties with a strong emphasis on digital participation, using the Five Star Movement (M5S) as a case study. Going beyond studies conceiving the M5S as a populist and digital party, we argue that activists support a democratic ideal based on a civic culture involving a demanding role for ordinary citizens, who should be highly interested in politics and involved locally on a day-to-day basis. A negative vision of the Italian citizen judged as incapable of playing this role accompanies this ideal. Our article also demonstrates how political involvement in the M5S transformed the visions of activists, making them warier of direct democracy and more disillusioned about their fellow citizens. The analysis relies on qualitative semi-directed interviews with former and current M5S activists with diversified socio-demographics, political and participation trajectories in two Italian regions. More broadly, our article shows that the effects of entering government and intra-party reforms reinforcing the leadership at the expense of local activists are particularly strong in anti-establishment parties and clash with the conceptions of participation supported by activists.

Institutions matter for postdisaster recovery. Conversely, natural disasters can also alter a society's institutions. Using the synthetic control method, this study examines the effects that Hurricane Katrina (2005) had on the formal and informal institutions in Louisiana. As measures of formal institutions, we employ two economic freedom scores corresponding to government employment (GE) (as a share of total employment at the state-level) and property tax (PT). These measures serve as proxies for the level of governmental interference into the economy and the protection of private property rights respectively. To assess the impact on informal institutions, we use state-level social capital data. We find that Hurricane Katrina had lasting impacts on Louisiana's formal institutions. In the post-Katrina period, we find that actual Louisiana had persistently higher economic freedom scores for both GE and PT than the synthetic Louisiana that did not experience the hurricane. These findings imply that the hurricane led to a reduction in both PTs and GE, which indicates a decrease in the relative size of the public sector as a share of the state's economy. On the other hand, we find no impact on our chosen measure of informal institution.

This study revisits the question of what impact Japanese colonialism had on the long-term economic development of North and South Korea. Factor endowments, economic activity and economic performance are compared between the regions that later became parts of North and South Korea, respectively. The study finds that important elements of the economic history of the peninsula have not been sufficiently acknowledged in much of the influential literature that uses Korea as an illustration of theoretical claims of the root causes of development. In particular, the fact that the economic divergence of northern and southern regions could be traced back to different colonial treatments – especially after mid-1920s – has often been overlooked when analysing the divergent post-partition development trajectories. The study suggests, based on a sectoral similarities analysis, that the initial dissimilar economic performance of North and South can at least partially be found in differences in political economy and economic trajectories preceding the partition.

Over the past decade, many health care systems across the Global North have implemented elements of market mechanisms while also dealing with the consequences of the financial crisis. Although effects of these two developments have been researched separately, their combined impact on the governance of health care organizations has received less attention. The aim of this study is to understand how health care reforms and the financial crisis together shaped new roles and interactions within health care. The Netherlands – where dynamics between health care organizations and their financial stakeholders (i.e., banks and health insurers) were particularly impacted – provides an illustrative case. Through semi-structured interviews, additional document analysis and insights from institutional change theory, we show how banks intensified relationship management, increased demands on loan applications and shifted financial risks onto health care organizations, while health insurers tightened up their monitoring and accountability practices towards health care organizations. In return, health care organizations were urged to rearrange their operations and become more risk-minded. They became increasingly dependent on banks and health insurers for their existence. Moreover, with this study, we show how institutional arenas come about through both the long-term efforts of institutional agents and unpredictable implications of economic and societal crises.

From climate change to disruptive technologies, policymakers constantly face new problems calling for unprecedented institutional solutions. Yet, we still poorly understand the inventive process leading to the emergence of new institutional forms. Existing theories argue that exogenous changes provide incentives and opportunities for institutional invention. However, they fail to explain how the inventive process endogenously structures their emergence. Drawing from complexity theory and Brian Arthur's work on technological inventions, we develop a structural theory recasting the process of inventing new institutions as the combination of pre-existing institutions. Building on three assumptions related to this combinatorial process, we argue that the distance between institutions shapes the emergence of new institutional forms and their regime's trajectory. Following the initial take-off in the number of institutional inventions at the creation of a regime, we expect the rate of institutional inventions over replications will slow down as nearby institutions are combined and accelerate as distant ones are combined. We illustrate these expectations by looking at three regimes: data privacy, climate governance, and investment protection. Together, they showcase how our combinatorial theory can help make sense of the emergence of unprecedented institutions and, more generally, the pace of unfolding complexity in various international regimes.

Building on the Hodgson–Mokyr debate in this journal (Volume 18, Issue 1, 2022), this article discusses how modern economic growth occurred in pre-Industrial Revolution Britain, with a particular focus on coalition politics and the marginalization of conservative political groups – vetoers to change. Such political marginalization was unusual before the 19th century, when monarchs had substantial political power and land-based conservative groups were their main political allies. This article finds the source of the English exceptionalism in the unique system of non-imperial personal union that Britain then had with the Dutch Republic and Hanover. Under this system, foreigner monarchs chose their local ally in Britain based on the security needs of their home states. It created a significant disadvantage to the Tories, the incumbent conservative groups, while providing a window of opportunity for the Whigs, the opposition group supported by new commercial interests, to form a coalition with the Crown. The long absence of the Tories from power resulted in the incorporation of their constituencies into the Whig-led regime, making the traditional economic interests the regime's ‘junior partners’, instead of formidable political competitors to the new commercial interests, which was the case before and elsewhere at that time.