Informing Institutional Design: Strategies for Comparative Cumulation

Abstract

Institutional features that vary across countries affect the operation of policy instruments. Researchers often leave these features unstated. The absence of a clear description of relevant institutional features not only interferes with effective borrowing of (first-order) policy instruments across national contexts, but also hinders the cumulation of research that could inform institutional design (second-order policy instruments). The authors propose a framework based on five characteristics of property rights (completeness of allocation, cost of alienation, security from trespass, credibility of persistence, and autonomy) to be assessed at three levels (individual, interorganizational, and intraorganizational) for facilitating accumulation of comparative information.