Instituciones. Reglas y procesos

Abstract

Institutions are a manifestation of power. According to H. Arendt, a second aspect has to be considered; institutions could decay and even petrify when the living power, the people´s power, doesn’t uphold them. The recent crisis in the national and the international political sphere, could derive from insufficient backing of power in institutional systems. However, their erosion would depend on several factors, not only of the “living power”, as H. Arendt stated. Deinstitutionalization processes are complex phenomena and, consequently, they require several levels of analysis: (1) institutions perform integration functions, articulating reciprocal expectations of agents, (2) as systems of rules, institutions define rights and duties (3) the role of “constitutive rules”. In general, the normativity or deontic power of public systems of rules has to be taken into account.