We offer a simple model of policymaking emphasizing socialization and limits on human cognition to explicate mechanisms of change in emergent (as opposed to established) institutions. Emergent institutions are more susceptible to change, and their opponents may use frames or existing reference...

In this paper, we examine the effects of interest group pressure and the structure of political institutions on infrastructure deployment by state-owned electric utilities in a panel of 78 countries during the period 1970-1994. We consider two factors that jointly influence the rate of...

Societal theories of trade policy stress the importance of domestic interest groups, whereas statist theories focus on the effects of domestic institutions. Debates over the relative merits of these approaches have been fierce, but little systematic empirical research has been brought to bear on...

Why do some countries adopt market-oriented reforms such as deregulation, privatization and liberalization of competition in their infrastructure industries while others do not? Why did the pace of adoption accelerate in the 1990s? Building on neo-institutional theory in sociology, we argue that...

This paper examines when and how a critical mass of social and political stakeholders mobilizes against a corporate organization, and the impact of such mobilization on the value of the organization. We examine the conditions and dynamics that explain whether an isolated, stakeholder-initiated...

We analyze the relationship between the actions and interactions of secondary stakeholders with an interest in corporate social performance (CSP) and variation in firm-level CSP across countries. Our work represents a significant theoretical shift in research exploring comparative CSP, which to...

Checks and balances that limit the discretion of policy-makers reduce the volatility of government expenditure and revenue. While this assumption is at the heart of a large body of empirical work, the association between political institutions and policy volatility has itself been the focus of...

Coercive isomorphism is a prominent source of institutional change. The literature to date has emphasized how actors that are powerful and legitimate (for example, a national government) may coerce the adoption of reforms by dependent actors (for example, state governments and other...