Operational Institutions

The normative analysis of public institutions in the domain of political theory has standardly revolved around such ideals as justice and legitimacy. Inspired by these ideals, political theorists have mainly asked the normative question of institutional design, that is how institutional rules and mechanisms should be conceived to realize or deliver justice or legitimacy. But certainly, even well-designed public institutions may fail if they cannot make those ideals operational in the practice of institutional action. To address this point means to ask the question of “institutional operability,” that is what conditions a public institution should meet to work in practice. In this paper, we show what it means to address this question from a normative point of view. To be sure, to ask the question of institutional operability may simply mean to invite the empirical analysis and assessment of public institutional action. This kind of exercise is informed by a causal logic, which—standardly by reference to external standards and performance indicators—describes and evaluates a public institution’s capacity to fulfill its purpose, e.g., to deliver a certain good or perform a certain function. Our main claim is that to appreciate what an operational public institution is from a normative point of view this outward outlook is insufficient. An inward outlook should be adopted too in order to engage in an exercise informed by a constitutive logic based on a clear understanding of how public institutions are internally structured. To vindicate this claim, we build on a basic idea of a public institution as a system of interrelated rule-governed embodied roles. While the feature of being rule-governed is definitive of any institution (including money), roles in public institutions have the distinguishing feature of being embodied, that is occupied by human persons (the officeholders). On the basis of this essential consideration, we explain how to analyze and assess how a public institution works in practice, one needs to analyze and assess the conduct of the officeholders in their institutional capacity. To understand this point is of utmost importance as it changes one’s outlook on the strategies to describe and evaluate public institutional action. While institutional purposes are visible and assessable from the outside a public institution (and so is the institution’s capacity to reach them), the practices of officeholders’ power exercise may primarily be accessed and assessed from an internal perspective. The main upshot of our discussion is that the normative analysis and assessment of institutional operability requires the adoption of an internal perspective that is premised on the officeholders’ direct engagement in a constant process of self-reflective scrutiny of their interrelated action. From this methodological conclusion, normative implications follow as concerns the maintenance of institutional operability. This latter is primarily a matter of institutional practice, which requires the direct mobilization of officeholders, and may not be conceived as just a matter of institutional design and regulation.