Autocrats frequently appeal to socially conservative values, but little is known about how or even whether such strategies are actually paying political dividends. To address important issues of causality, this study exploits Russian president Vladimir Putin’s 2020 bid to gain a popular mandate for contravening presidential term limits in part by bundling this constitutional change with a raft of amendments that would enshrine traditional morality (including heteronormativity and anti-secularism) in Russia’s basic law. Drawing on an original experiment-bearing survey of the Russian population, it finds that Putin’s appeal to these values generated substantial new support for Putin’s reform package, primarily from social conservatives who did not support him politically. These findings expand our understanding of authoritarian practices and policy making by revealing one way in which core political values are leveraged to facilitate autocracy-enabling institutional changes and potentially other ends that autocrats might pursue.

The authors examine the 1910, 1920, 1930, and 1940 US censuses to identify demographic characteristics of children who resided in public and private institutions for minors, with special attention to patterns of racial segregation and exclusion. The article focuses on public and private institutions founded exclusively to serve children and youth and also on correctional institutions for children and adults. The authors found racial segregation in private institutions, underrepresentation of children of color in both private and public institutions, and overrepresentation of boys of color in correctional institutions for minors and adults. They also identified a historical pattern, with few exceptions, of excluding girls of color from all types of public and private institutions.

The last decades have seen important progress in the economic analysis of institutions, with increasing concern about the need to ‘unbundle’ this concept and the diversity of situations it covers. It is so because of the complexity of the systems the concept intends to capture and the ambiguity of definitions often perceived as catch-all ideas without a clear connection to a research strategy. This essay contributes to the literature emphasising that overcoming these difficulties requires a theoretical framework identifying and characterising distinct institutional layers. The content of this framework is substantiated through the analysis of the nature and role of the long-ignored intermediate layer of ‘meso-institutions’. Meso-institutions designate devices and transmission mechanisms linking general rules, norms and beliefs established at the macro-institutional level with their perception, adaptation, and implementation (or challenge) by the actors populating the micro-level. Operationalising this framework relies on a research strategy that proceeds from a ‘substantive theory’ of institutions to the collection and processing of ‘empirical evidences’ through the development of ‘auxiliary theories’ designed to capture specific institutional objects. References to several empirical studies support the relevance of this approach.

Scholarship on Roman political thought and its legacy, especially anglophone, has rapidly expanded over the last decade. The main drivers of this renewed attention to Roman political ideas and institutions are an historical interest in the collapse of the Roman republic; a philosophical interest in republicanism; and a growing sensitivity to the originality of Roman thinkers, especially Cicero, in contrast to the older view that they were simply derivative of the Greeks. In this essay I will discuss recent publications on Cicero and Roman political ideas. After offering an overview of key themes in this new scholarship, I seek to suggest promising directions for future research and encourage the growing interest in Roman political thought and Cicero in particular. Cicero provides a fascinating link between ideas, institutions and action on the ground and he is therefore with good reason at the centre of much of the rapidly expanding literature on Roman political thought. In addition, given his interest in developing a theory of justice as the foundation of the state (res publica), a focus on Cicero will help explore the legacy of republicanism from the angle of his ideas about justice while paying attention to scholarship placing these ideas into their historical and institutional context.

The secrecy of intelligence institutions might give the impression that intelligence is an ethics-free zone, but this is not the case. In The Ethics of National Security Intelligence Institutions, Adam Henschke, Seumas Miller, Andrew Alexandra, Patrick Walsh, and Roger Bradbury examine the ways that liberal democracies have come to rely on intelligence institutions for effective decision-making and look at the best ways to limit these institutions’ power and constrain the abuses they have the potential to cause. In contrast, the value of Amy Zegart’s and Miah Hammond-Errey’s research, in their respective books, Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence and Big Data, Emerging Technologies and Intelligence: National Security Disrupted, is the access each of them provides to the thoughts and opinions of the intelligence practitioners working in these secretive institutions. What emerges is a consensus that the fundamental moral purpose of intelligence institutions should be truth telling. In other words, intelligence should be a rigorous epistemic activity that seeks to improve decision-makers’ understanding of a rapidly changing world. Moreover, a key ethical challenge for intelligence practitioners in liberal democracies is how to do their jobs effectively in a way that does not undermine public trust. Measures recommended include better oversight and accountability mechanisms, adoption of a ‘risk of transparency’ principle, and greater understanding of and respect for privacy rights.

Social scientists are paying attention to the role that knowledge plays in economic phenomena. This focus on knowledge has led to exploring two challenges: first, its governance to reap positive externalities and solve social dilemmas, and second, how we can craft institutions to match the intangible nature of ideas with adequate property rules. This article contributes by elaborating on the different knowledge property regimes and the elements contributing to their classification. This paper first taxonomises knowledge governance regimes based on Ostrom’s work on institutional analysis. Second, it examines why governance structures for managing knowledge production vary across industries, according to (1) the characteristics of knowledge, (2) the attributes of the organisations, and (3) the different rules-in-use to enforce property rights. This is the first study at the intersection of institutional analysis and political economy that highlights the knowledge features, incentive structures, and mechanisms undergirding knowledge governance in different property regimes.

Latin American and South European countries share a common policy legacy of public Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) pension systems, yet reform paths taken over the past decades between and within the two regions have varied. Latin American countries opted for the full or partial privatization of their public pension systems, yet subsequent reforms have challenged the public–private mix. Meanwhile, countries in Southern Europe opted for a less radical path, entailing different degrees of reform of their public pillars and the introduction of supplementary private ones. Our analysis focuses on Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay – in Latin America – and Spain, Italy, and Greece – in Southern Europe – and the reforms implemented since 1990. In understanding reform variation, we argue that by focusing on the role of political institutions and policy legacies, it is possible to identify reform mechanisms.

Human societies reliably develop complex cultural traditions with striking similarities. These “super-attractors” span the domains of magic and religion (e.g., shamanism, supernatural punishment beliefs), aesthetics (e.g., heroic tales, dance songs), and social institutions (e.g., justice, corporate groups), and collectively constitute what I call the “cultural manifold.” The cultural manifold represents a set of equilibrium states of social and cultural evolution: hypothetically cultureless humans placed in a novel and empty habitat will eventually produce most or all of these complex traditions. Although the study of the super-attractors has been characterized by explanatory pluralism, particularly an emphasis on processes that favor individual- or group-level benefits, I here argue that their development is primarily underlain by a process I call “subjective selection,” or the production and selective retention of variants that are evaluated as instrumentally useful for satisfying goals. Humans around the world are motivated towards similar ends, such as healing illness, explaining misfortune, calming infants, and inducing others to cooperate. As we shape, tweak, and preferentially adopt culture that appears most effective for achieving these ends, we drive the convergence of complex traditions worldwide. The predictable development of the cultural manifold reflects the capacity of humans to sculpt traditions that apparently provide them with what they want, attesting to the importance of subjective selection in shaping human culture.

This article extends recent insights from new institutional economics to explore the relevance of the concept of meso-institutions. It does so through the exploration of the case of the Brazilian Forest Code, pointing out how and why meso-institutions play a key role in making public policies effective. More specifically, our study shows how crucial is the complete fulfilling of the functions characterising meso-institutions – namely translation, monitoring, and enforcement, to implement regulations and determine their effectiveness. Lessons are drawn regarding the complexities inherent in the creation, implementation, and operationalisation of rules across a multilayered institutional environment.