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Policy scientists have long been concerned with understanding the basic tools, or instruments, that governments can use to accomplish their goals. The initial interest in inductively developing comprehensive lists of generic instruments for policy analysis soon gave way to efforts to discover more parsimonious, but still useful, specifications of the elementary components out of which instruments can be assembled. Moving from a generic instrument to a fully specified policy alternative, however, requires the designer to go much beyond the elementary components. Rather than directly specifying some of these details, the designer may instead set the rules by which they will be specified. The creation of these specifications and rules can be thought of as institutional design. This book helps scholars and policy analysts formulate more effective policy alternatives by a better understanding of institutional design. The feasibility and effectiveness of policies depend on the political, economic, and social contexts in which they are embedded. These contexts provide an environment of existing institutions that offer opportunities and barriers to institutional design. A fundamental understanding of institutional design requires theories of institutions and institutional change. With a resurgence of interest in institutions in recent years, there are many possible sources of theory. The contributors to this volume draw from the variety of sources to identify implications for understanding institutional design

Problems of institutional design and redesign, structuring and restructuring, acquired particular poignancy through recent developments from eastern Europe to southern Africa. At the same time, scholars in each of several disciplines - political science, economics, sociology, history and philosophy - have increasingly come to appreciate the important independent role that is, and should be, played by institutional factors in social life. In this volume, disparate theories of institutional design given by each of those several disciplines are synthesized and their peculiar power illustrated. Through analysis of examples ranging from changes in the British welfare state through the transition of eastern European societies to the reward structure of the modern university, the contributors emphasize the important interpenetration of normative and empirical issues in theories of institutional design

Representation and Institutional Design examines how variation in the structures and processes of state legislatures affect how legislators represent their constituents. It examines whether electoral laws, term limits, professionalism, and district size and magnitude affect legislators' electoral vulnerability, ambition, and role orientations, as well as their actions involving symbolic, service and policy representation. This book reveals that legislative staff increases legislators' closeness to their constituents, legislative resources tend to increase symbolic and service representation but do little to help policy representation, and term limits tend to weaken relationships between legislators and constituents. These issues address what has been an enduring question for most nations: how to best represent their citizens and their needs.