Evolutionary Concepts in Institutional Analysis

Abstract

Since Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species at the end of the 18th Century natural scientists have explained the variety of species living on earth by an evolutionary mechanism. Darwin’s work inspired diverse fields of study such as sociobiology, evolutionary epistemology, population ecology, evolutionary economics or meme theory. Until recently the theorems and concepts of evolution have not played a significant role in political theory, the study of political institutions or political science as a whole. It was as if Darwin never existed. However, in the last years some researchers started using evolutionary concepts for analyses. Those works see the variety of political institutions as the result of long processes much like those that produced nature’s manifold beings. This panel seeks to explain how institutions evolve over time and space, what patterns they exhibit, which selection criteria are at work and how institutions interact with their respective niches. In doing so, we also want to look into the “institutional blueprints”, i.e. the sets of norms that create institutions. Connecting the evolution paradigm to history, cultural geography and political sociology, we want to find out which memes form the building blocks of institutional development; which ones are inherited and travel from one culture to another and from one century to another, while others do not. Morphological concepts in institutional analysis are another field of interest in the context of this panel, as are works that deal with the synthetic theory of evolution in a political science context.

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