#Steven Levitsky

[imkeepinit]

[ravioliraz]

Really good article contextualizing how the republican administration is able to weaponize existing institutions to undermine democracy leading to an “competitive autocracy.”

Give it a read, we need to understand their playbook in order to resist effectively.

[garyconkling]

Defending Democracy Under Assault

U.S. elections are under assault. The Russians circulate fake videos. Elon Musk stokes conspiracy theories on X. Donald Trump hurls insults and lies in rallies and interviews. Right-wing groups file legal actions to challenge election results before votes are counted. According to Trumpian logic – the only way there isn’t election fraud is if I win. Eventually, the smoke will disappear,…

[thatstormygeek]

This is a thought-provoking interview and definitely worth the read, but the whole piece - and especially this part - made me feel like I was watching the conversation from the other side of a soundproof window, just banging away with my fists.

I don’t understand how you approach a conversation about encroaching fascism in the US in 2024 (or 2023 or 2022) without even mentioning the LGBT community given that every one of those years has seen a record number of bills introduced in state legislatures to curtail the rights of queer - and especially trans - people.

It’s not even ahistorical - queer and trans people were also specifically targeted by the Nazis.

We really are that invisible.

[davidpotash]

Tune-up or Rebuild the Machinery of Government

A few years into the Trump presidency, two Harvard University professors of government, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt wrote How Democracies Die. The book was a best-seller, calling out the decline in tolerance and respect across political party divides. The pair followed that effort in 2023 with Tyranny of the Minority. Equally popular, this volume highlights historical crises to make…

[mariacallous]

The recent weeks have obliged me to unearth some research I had hoped could stay on the backburner. In 2023, I wrote about the major forms of democratic erosion facing the United States: election subversion and executive aggrandizement. “Even a legitimately elected leader can undermine democracy,” I noted, “if they eliminate governmental ‘checks and balances’ or consolidate power in unaccountable institutions.” In 2022, I suggested that, if weaknesses in the formal institutions of American politics made it difficult to forestall additional assaults on the Constitution, the final backstop of democracy is civil society.

Historically, the United States has been fortunate to have a strong civil society. Many of these institutions have weakened. In this article, I quickly review how some sectors—the media, the academy, business, and mass voluntary organizations—are responding to “the most serious examples of executive branch malfeasance in American history.”

American civil society has essential nodes of power that must be energized in the coming days and for the foreseeable future. Not merely the individuals in these institutions, but the institutions themselves must coordinate to provide a public counterweight to the sharp lurch toward personalist rule. That work is not easy. Any more time lost to disbelief, silence, and acquiescence will make it much harder.

Some major media institutions have been slow off the mark. Major scoops have come from unexpected outlets, including independent journalists and the technology magazine WIRED, which was the first to reveal that Elon Musk’s young staff had the power to alter the $6 trillion Treasury payment system, a fact that Treasury officials had denied. (A federal judge has since blocked access. An earlier ruling had limited access to read-only, a problematic ruling given Musk’s conflicts of interest and the security threats posed by his unvetted and secretive young staff. It is unclear if either order is being followed.)

DC’s hometown paper, the Washington Post, should by rights have the best sources in the federal government, but the interference of the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, in the planned endorsement of Kamala Harris, and his prominent place at the Trump inauguration, may well be keeping whistleblowers away. The paper nonetheless has provided some important reporting, including this round-up of Elon Musk’s interference in government operations. The New York Times has buried several excellent, insightful analyses and essays deep in the paper, and adopted tortured euphemisms and vague, small-print headlines that leave their readers uninformed of the gravity of the news.

Academic institutions are largely silent, but that may be changing. Academics have for years been sounding the alarm about America’s democratic erosion, and many continue to provide vital analysis and context. See, for example, these analyses from Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, Kim Lane Scheppele, and Don Moynihan. But academia has been outspoken as individuals. Institutions have mostly remained silent—though they may be shaken loose from their apathy by the executive orders interfering with billions in congressionally appropriated funds for scientific research.

Coordinated public pronouncements from university leadership, especially from law and medical schools, would assist citizens in understanding the scope of the dangers confronting the country. Top hospital administrators and medical associations that have been quiescent in recent weeks need to make clear the immense public health costs of ill-considered, arbitrary, and unlawful interference with government-funded science. In addition, professional associations have the power to sanction their members, a power they should exercise in defense of the public sphere, as my colleague Quinta Jurecic has argued.

Business concerns are not yet being channeled into political action. Autocratic populist leaders damage the economy; their countries see their GDPs drop due to erratic policymaking, cronyism, and underinvestment in public goods. But, as I wrote last year, business leaders have a tragic history of misjudging these dangers. American business influence, moreover, has grown increasingly ideologically conservative and focused on narrow benefits like tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks.

Since the election, business leaders have truckled to the new administration—a trend many, including President Trump, have suggested is driven by fear of official reprisals. That fear is, of course, one of the common ways in which opposition to populist authoritarian leaders is eliminated.

It may be, however, that business will awake to the massive economic dangers posed by executive overreach. Opaque and unpredictable stoppages of congressionally mandated spending by federal agencies will ramify throughout the economy. An unvetted young individual meddling with the code that underwrites the Treasury payment system is, as one Treasury contractor wrote, an “unprecedented insider threat risk.” (That contractor has since been “removed” by their employer, Booz Allen, a consulting firm heavily reliant on government contracts.)

Mass mobilization is underway, but those efforts will struggle if elites continue to underplay the magnitude of the moment. Congressional offices have been flooded with phone calls. As the volume went from the usual dozens to more than 1,500 calls per minute, the phone system buckled under the strain. Advocacy organizations appear to have been caught flat-footed by the speed of Musk’s incursions. Small protests have occurred at government agencies and congressional offices, with union organizations often playing a key role.

Religious organizations have not yet been prominent in most public protests, but they have an essential role to play. As my colleague Jonathan Rauch has written in a new book, churches must combat the rise of what has been termed Christian nationalism.

More broadly, public opposition to the second Trump administration remains far smaller than it was the last time around, even though recent actions represent a far more aggressive assault on American governance. This is perhaps in part because Trump’s loss of the popular vote in 2016 provided an impetus for organizing before the administration even began. Whether the organizing gap will close is a critical question in the weeks and months to come.

Across all of sectors of civil society, coordination is key. Individual objections do not carry the weight of joint action. It is worth noting that censorship in authoritarian China does not focus on “negative, even vitriolic, criticism of the state,” it silences “comments that represent, reinforce, or spur social mobilization.” Resistance to authoritarianism, like democracy itself, is a collective endeavor.

[gusty-wind]

NEW TALKING POINT

THAT THE CONSTITUTION IS "OUTDATED" BY "TRAITORS"

[vampiremotif]

part 1 of a series I’m going to call

books to get through This*

this* being Current Times (unfortunately more precedented than you might think!)

1. how democracies die (2018)

author(s): Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt

synopsis

The first one-third of the book essentially takes a comparative history approach, comparing different democracies that have failed across the world and identifying their shared characteristics. From this, developing a framework to identify when democracy is descending into authoritarianism. The next two-thirds of the book goes into how this relates to the United States and, what I would say, are fragile, barely-there guard rails in American society to protect against authoritarian rulers. (God, so much of American government is a bunch of norms in a trench coat.) It’s written incredibly accessibly and I was honestly riveted the whole time. I couldn’t put it down. It lends itself to really understanding all of the ways the foundations of the American government has led us to this moment.

scope & limitations

Since it was published in 2018, the authors are writing from the perspective of the midst of Trump's first term. Because of this, they obviously don't have the context of the pandemic (and the massive fail in government response), impeachment, or of the January 6th insurrection. (Frankly, I believe this makes their warnings all the more potent.)

author credentials

Authors are both American political scientists. Both are professors of government at Harvard University. Levitsky is a senior fellow for democracy at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“Building on Linz's work, we have developed a set of four behavioral warning signs that can help us know an authoritarian when we see one. We should worry when a politician 1) rejects, in words or action, the democratic rules of the game, 2) denies the legitimacy of opponents, 3) tolerates or encourages violence, or 4) indicates a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media. Table 1 shows how to assess politicians in terms of these four factors. A politician who meets even one of these criteria is cause for concern.”

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Mike Damiano and Hilary Burns at Boston Globe:

Throughout the presidential campaign, Donald Trump and his allies have lambasted universities as “woke” indoctrination mills that radicalize youths against America and rip off students with inflated tuition.

Trump has said that, if elected, he will “reclaim” universities from the “Marxist maniacs and lunatics” who currently control them. His running mate, JD Vance, who once exhorted supporters to “attack the universities,” has praised the authoritarian leader of Hungary for seizing control of that country’s institutions of higher education. Such remarks could be dismissed as Trumpian bombast. But a Globe review of a year’s worth of campaign videos, policy statements, and recent remarks by top Republicans suggests something else: that behind his incendiary words lies a set of specific policies that a second Trump administration could pursue to exert wide-ranging influence over American universities. “There’s a lot of levers and tools that will get their attention day one,” Steve Scalise, the second-highest-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives, said at a meeting with a lobbying group early this month while discussing ways to punish universities for alleged civil rights violations.

Trump and his allies have said a second Trump administration would replace universities’ existing oversight agencies —which wield clout over funding and fair practices —with new ones that would defend “the American tradition and Western civilization.” Trump says he would ramp up civil rights investigations into antisemitism and racial discrimination, a term conservatives have inverted from familiar usage to refer to affirmative action and campus diversity initiatives. And, crucially, he would cut off federal funding to universities deemed to be in violation of federal rules.

The plans are aggressive but feasible, higher education experts said, because they call for using existing federal powers that are under the control of the president. If Trump wins the election, he could follow through on these and other proposals through regulation and executive actions even if the Republican Party does not control Congress. “You have a lot of jurisdiction as president with all of these different [executive branch] agencies,” Scalise said at the Washington meeting held by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The Guardian first published video of the remarks. To his campaign and its supporters, Trump’s promise to crack down on higher education represents an overdue reckoning for institutions that have become, in their view, excessively left-leaning and have strayed from their founding missions.

[...] But some critics hear Trump’s pronouncements about higher education as the rhetoric of a man who revels in executive power and wants to move against his political enemies and quash dissent. “This is what authoritarians do,” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard government professor who studies democracy and authoritarianism. “Authoritarians of the left, of the center, of the right go after universities.” Trump himself has praised the authoritarian leaders of China, Russia, and Hungary. Vance said in a CBS interview reflecting on Viktor Orbán’s takeover of his country’s universities that the Hungarian president “has made some smart decisions there that we could learn from.”

In some ways, the Trump plans for federal higher education policy are an extension of Republican ideas that have already been implemented in some states. In recent years, Republican governors and state legislatures have banned diversity and inclusion offices, replaced public university leaders with ideological allies, and cut back on courses viewed as having a liberal slant. So far, those efforts have mostly been confined to red states, but higher education insiders fear that Trump could implement similar policies nationally. “We already see the way that state governments have been politicizing higher education, and to do that at a federal level would be devastating,” said Natasha Warikoo, a Tufts University sociology professor.

[...] The plan’s primary target is the federal funding — in the form of student financial aid and research grants — that most colleges and universities depend on to stay in business. In total, it amounts to tens of billions of dollars a year. To receive that crucial funding, institutions must be in compliance with federal rules, including civil rights laws. And to benefit from student financial aid they must have the stamp of approval of an accrediting agency recognized by the federal government.

[...] Another lever Trump and allies say they plan to use is federal civil rights law. “I will direct the Department of Justice to pursue federal civil rights cases against schools that continue to engage in racial discrimination and schools that persist in explicit unlawful discrimination under the guise of equity,” Trump said in the campaign video. [...]

In practice, the more typical outcome has been an agreement with the federal government in which the university promises to change its behavior or policies.

In addition to using the Justice Department, a second Trump administration could investigate alleged civil rights violations through the Department of Education. In the last year, the department has fielded dozens of official complaints alleging that universities are violating civil rights laws by allowing antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of hate to fester. Republican congressional leaders have summoned university presidents to Washington for hearings on campus antisemitism, which contributed to the resignations of three Ivy League presidents, including Harvard’s Claudine Gay. “We’ve had the hearings. We’ve got it teed up,” Scalise said at the meeting held by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. If Trump wins, it may be possible to withhold billions of dollars of federal funding from schools that the federal government decides are violating students’ civil rights, he said.

Coward, the free speech advocate, said there was nothing inherently concerning about vows to enforce civil rights laws. In the past year, since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war, there have been assaults on Jewish students and instances of protesters blocking students from accessing parts of college campuses, which could amount to civil rights violations, he said. But he also warned that civil rights enforcement can go too far, imperiling free expression. Even under the Biden administration, he said, the Department of Education has urged universities to clamp down on pro-Palestinian speech protected by the First Amendment. Some of the policies proposed by Trump and his allies could further increase the pressure on universities and lead to more suppression of speech, he said. “When the institutions are choosing between their students’ First Amendment rights or losing their federal funding, almost all of them are going to choose censorship over loss of federal funding,” Coward said.

Wood, the former Boston University administrator who is now the president of the right-leaning National Association of Scholars, said some of Trump’s plans struck him as reasonable, including the prospect of accreditation reform. He and other conservative critics of higher education say the accreditors have strayed from their original mission of merely ensuring that schools are financially sound and providing an adequate education. Now, Wood says, they are overtly political and push DEI priorities. But critics of Trump’s plans see a power grab that could undermine universities’ independence.

If Donald Trump gets re-elected, he will follow the Viktor Orbán model of suppressing higher education and remaking it in his image to a tool of fascism.

Vote for Kamala Harris to keep academic freedom in universities.

[rorygilmorecore]

2024 Reading List 📚

Here is my reading list for 2024 and all the books I plan to get to that are not for school. Sorry for how non aesthetic the pictures look.

Dis United Nations by Peter Zeihan.

Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky.

How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt.

The Rise of ISIS by Joby Warrick.

Twilight of Democracy by Anne Applebaum.

Soft Power by Joesph S Nye Jr (eBook).

I'd like to try to read more novels this year, but I don't currently have any in mind right now. However, I used to be really into Ernest Hemingway and Jane Austen, so maybe I will reread some favorites of mine.

These are also the books I plan to use for the LSAT.

Not pictured:

Lawhub tests | Khan Academy Prep | 7Sage LSAT Prep

I'm also trying to expand my vocabulary with GRE prep. Moreover, I also want to start doing word puzzles and sudoku regularly.

[feministdragon]

— When the 2000 election recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court was halted by five corrupt Republicans on the US Supreme Court — handing the White House to George W. Bush by a disputed 537 votes — nobody knew at the time that Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, had commissioned a huge purge of voters, using a list of Texas felons that was 68% Black and Hispanic.

Harris did this because the national pool of Black and Hispanic names is relatively small: Black felons in Texas with names like Jim Washington or Jose Gonzalez are extremely likely to have similarly named counterparts in any other state with large Black and Hispanic populations like Florida. 

Thus, when those Texas names were compared via a “loose match” (didn’t require a birthday or middle name match) with Florida voters’ names, disproportionate numbers of Black and Hispanic Florida voters were deemed to be possible felons who’d somehow recently moved to Florida from Texas, and tens of thousands were removed from the voter rolls. As the US Commission on Civil Rights noted:

“14.4 percent of Florida’s black voters cast ballots that were rejected. This compares with approximately 1.6 percent of nonblack Florida voters who did not have their presidential votes counted. … [I]n the state's largest county, Miami-Dade, more than 65 percent of the names on the purge list were African Americans, who represented only 20.4 percent of the population.”

— When Donald Trump was certified the winner of the 2016 election, nobody knew at the time that Russia had illegally poured millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of man-hours into targeting swing state voters identified by the RNC, whose names were handed off to Russian Intelligence by Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort.

When Robert Mueller’s FBI team determined this crime had helped put Trump in the White House, and that Trump had personally intervened in investigations ten separate times in ways that could be prosecuted as criminal obstruction of justice, Bill Barr kept the news from America until the story had largely faded from the headlines.

What will it be this November? We have some clues.

— With the blessing of five Republicans on the 2018 Supreme Court, Republican-controlled states with large Black and Hispanic populations are purging voter rolls like there’s no tomorrow. Just between 2020 and 2022, fully 19,260,000 Americans — 8.5% of all registered voters — were purged. The purge rate in Red states was 40% higher than the rest of the country. We won’t know this year’s purge numbers until well after the election is over.

— The GOP is trying to organize an “army” of 100,000 rightwing warriors to show up at polling places to “oversee” elections and challenge voters they think look suspicious. They’ll also be challenging signature matches on mail-in ballots, particularly in Blue cities in Red states.

— Republican elected officials from the state level all the way up to the US Senate are refusing to say that they’ll accept or certify the result of the election this fall if Donald Trump doesn’t win. Multiple Republican members of Congress have asserted that only the House of Representatives should decide the presidential election this year (which would throw the election to Trump regardless of who the voters or electoral college choose).

— In multiple states, Republicans have passed laws allowing them to manipulate and change the location of polling places, criminalize voter registration drives, replace Democratic and nonpartisan election officials with partisan GOP hacks, and in Georgia and Arizona throw out ballots from entire precincts. As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt noted for The Atlantic: “Throwing out thousands of ballots in rival strongholds may be profoundly antidemocratic, but it is technically legal, and Republicans in several states now have a powerful stick with which to enforce such practices.”

— Typically, when politicians engage in nakedly deceptive politicking or election theft they’re outed in the press and punished at the polls. Since 2020, however, Republicans have rewarded their politicians who tell lies and engage in underhanded tactics, suggesting there will be no limits to what the Trump campaign might do or say in the weeks leading up to the election, including the use of deepfakes and AI.

— Saudi Arabia and Russia — both allies of Trump — have cut oil production by over 1.4 million barrels a day to drive up gasoline prices leading up to this November, just like they did in a dress rehearsal during the fall of 2022. History shows that gas prices spiking over $5 or even $6 a gallon will have a measurable impact on inflation and thus the election.

— Russia fielded a small army of online trolls to assist Trump’s electoral efforts in 2016 and 2020. Expect the same in November, except this time, according to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, China is also getting into the act on the GOP’s behalf. 

— Benjamin Netanyahu defied President Obama when he was engaged in delicate negotiations with Iran, visiting the US and addressing Congress at the invitation of Republicans. He’s expected to do the same slap-in-the-face gesture this fall to Biden, along with defying the president’s wish that Israel minimize civilian casualties in Gaza. Netanyahu will do everything he can to ensure Trump comes back into office if for no other reason than keeping himself out of prison; demoralizing young progressive voters will almost certainly be at the top of his list.

But these are all things we know about right now, even if there’s little we can do about most of them.

Given the Nixon/Reagan/Bush examples, our biggest concern should be to find the things we’d otherwise look back on after the inauguration and say about them, “Nobody knew at the time…”

[husbandhannie]

do you have any book recs? i’m trying to find ways to fill my free time that isn’t scrolling around on my phone 😭

i'm not sure if i'm the best person to ask for book recs, anon. my tastes are not wide by any means and i'm not really a critical reader, but i tried to list some books i enjoyed here (there are many more but i went with the ones i can remember at the top of my head):

FICTION

(organized by author)

Agatha Christie: If you're looking for comfort murder mysteries, there is no better author. My favorite is the Miss Marple series, where a gossip-loving and extremely sharp old woman solves murder mysteries.

Richard Castle: Yes, these are the Nikki Heat books from the show Castle. They're quite well written, and even more fun to read if you're familiar with the characters of the show.

Tess Gerritsen: These are more intense murder mysteries than the ones listed above, and slightly more forensic. My favorite series is the Rizzoli and Isles series, which is the inspiration for the TV show of the same name.

Nora Roberts: Still some of the best romance I've read, honestly. After reading about 50 of her books, I can confidently say that her characters fall in fixed molds and the storylines are very predictable. It's still very good. It's comforting. You can read a bunch of them in a day to destress. Some series I like are: Inn Boonsboro, The Calhouns.

NON-FICTION

(organised by theme)

Threats to Democracy: How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky, Fascism by Madeline Albright, Twilight of Democracy by Anne Applebaum

Autobiographies: James Herriot (I cannot recommend this enough), Trevor Noah

Historical: The Great Influenza by John M. Barry, To Start a War by Robert Draper (this made me angrier than I thought was possible by a book)

Government Institutions: The Premonition by Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis

Feminism: Hood Feminism by Mikki Kendall, We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Government Intelligence Agencies: Mossad by Michael Bar-Zohar and Nissim Mishal

[fadingsunsjvj]

A Year of Elections: Professor Steven Levitsky on Populism’s Resurgence and Democratic Resilience

[knick-nudiex]

Institution

An institution is a humanly devised structure of rules and norms that shape and constrain social behavior. All definitions of institutions generally entail that there is a level of persistence and continuity. Laws, rules, social conventions and norms are all examples of institutions. Institutions vary in their level of formality and informality.

Institutions are a principal object of study in social sciences such as political science, anthropology, economics, and sociology (the latter described by Émile Durkheim as the "science of institutions, their genesis and their functioning"). Primary or meta-institutions are institutions such as the family or money that are broad enough to encompass sets of related institutions. Institutions are also a central concern for law, the formal mechanism for political rule-making and enforcement. Historians study and document the founding, growth, decay and development of institutions as part of political, economic and cultural history.

There are a variety of definitions of the term institution. These definitions entail varying levels of formality and organizational complexity. The most expansive definitions may include informal but regularized practices, such as handshakes, whereas the most narrow definitions may only include institutions that are highly formalized (e.g. have specified laws, rules and complex organizational structures).

According to Wolfgang Streeck and Kathleen Thelen, institutions are, in the most general sense, "building blocks of social order: they represent socially sanctioned, that is, collectively enforced expectations with respect to the behavior of specific categories of actors or to the performance of certain activities. Typically, they involve mutually related rights and obligations for actors." Sociologists and anthropologists have expansive definitions of institutions that include informal institutions. Political scientists have sometimes defined institutions in more formal ways where third parties must reliably and predictably enforce the rules governing the transactions of first and second parties.

One prominent Rational Choice Institutionalist definition of institutions is provided by Jack Knight who defines institutions as entailing "a set of rules that structure social interactions in particular ways" and that "knowledge of these rules must be shared by the members of the relevant community or society." Definitions by Knight and Randall Calvert exclude purely private idiosyncrasies and conventions.

Douglass North argues that institutions are "humanly devised constraints that shape interaction". According to North, they are critical determinants of economic performance, having profound effects on the costs of exchange and production. He emphasizes that small historical and cultural features can drastically change the nature of an institution. Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson agree with the analysis presented by North. They write that institutions play a crucial role in the trajectory of economic growth because economic institutions shape the opportunities and constraints of investment. Economic incentives also shape political behavior, as certain groups receive more advantages from economic outcomes than others, which allow them to gain political control. A separate paper by Acemoglu, Robinson, and Francisco A. Gallego details the relationships between institutions, human capital, and economic development. They argue that institutions set an equal playing field for competition, making institutional strength a key factor in economic growth. Authors Steven Levitsky and María Victoria Murillo claim that institutional strength depends on two factors: stability and enforcement. An unstable, unenforced institution is one where weak rules are ignored and actors are unable to make expectations based on their behavior. In a weak institution, actors cannot depend on one another to act according to the rules, which creates barriers to collective action and collaboration.

Other social scientists have examined the concept of institutional lock-in. In an article entitled "Clio and the Economics of QWERTY" (1985), economist Paul A. David describes technological lock-in as the process by which a specific technology dominates the market, even when the technology is not the most efficient of the ones available. He proceeds to explain that lock-in is a result of path-dependence, where the early choice of technology in a market forces other actors to choose that technology regardless of their natural preferences, causing that technology to "lock-in". Economist W. Brian Arthur applied David's theories to institutions. As with a technology, institutions (in the form of law, policy, social regulations, or otherwise) can become locked into a society, which in turn can shape social or economic development.[19] Arthur notes that although institutional lock-in can be predictable, it is often difficult to change once it is locked-in because of its deep roots in social and economic frameworks.

Randall Calvert defines institution as "an equilibrium of behavior in an underlying game."[12] This means that "it must be rational for nearly every individual to almost always adhere to the behavior prescriptions of the institution, given that nearly all other individuals are doing so."

Robert Keohane defined institutions as "persistent and connected sets of rules (formal or informal) that prescribe behavioral roles, constrain activity, and shape expectations." Samuel P. Huntington defined institutions as "stable, valued, recurring patterns of behavior."

Avner Greif and David Laitin define institutions "as a system of human-made, nonphysical elements – norms, beliefs, organizations, and rules – exogenous to each individual whose behavior it influences that generates behavioral regularities." Additionally, they specify that organizations "are institutional elements that influence the set of beliefs and norms that can be self-enforcing in the transaction under consideration. Rules are behavioral instructions that facilitate individuals with the cognitive task of choosing behavior by defining the situation and coordinating behavior."

All definitions of institutions generally entail that there is a level of persistence and continuity. Laws, rules, social conventions and norms are all examples of institutions. Organizations and institutions can be synonymous, but Jack Knight writes that organizations are a narrow version of institutions or represent a cluster of institutions; the two are distinct in the sense that organizations contain internal institutions (that govern interactions between the members of the organizations).

An informal institution tends to have socially shared rules, which are unwritten and yet are often known by all inhabitants of a certain country, as such they are often referred to as being an inherent part of the culture of a given country. Informal practices are often referred to as "cultural", for example clientelism or corruption is sometimes stated as a part of the political culture in a certain place, but an informal institution itself is not cultural, it may be shaped by culture or behaviour of a given political landscape, but they should be looked at in the same way as formal institutions to understand their role in a given country. The relationship between formal and informal institutions is often closely aligned and informal institutions step in to prop up inefficient institutions. However, because they do not have a centre, which directs and coordinates their actions, changing informal institutions is a slow and lengthy process.

According to Geoffrey M. Hodgson, it is misleading to say that an institution is a form of behavior. Instead, Hodgson states that institutions are "integrated systems of rules that structure social interactions."