Timur Kuran
The purpose of this course is to introduce students to diverse scholarly literatures on the significance of social institutions, with an emphasis on ongoing debates in political economy—a subfield that uses economic reasoning and techniques to study subjects at the heart of political science. A bit more than half of the course addresses the social mechanisms that govern institutional transformations. The emphasis is on the methodologies used to study institutional change, especially within economics, political science, and historical legal studies. Attention is paid to the pace of institutional transformations, latent change, social inertia, political revolutions, and links among beliefs and behaviors. Case studies are drawn from diverse contexts, but especially commercial organization and political governance. The rest of the course focuses on selected social functions of institutions. Again, the emphasis is on pertinent analytical methodologies. The following functions will be covered: coping with cognitive limitations, the provision of collective goods, redistribution, and rent seeking. Other functions, such as control of free riding, credible commitment, coordination, protection of expectations, generation of common knowledge, and the reduction of transaction costs, may be covered briefly at the end, if time permits, and depending on class interest.
