Stefano Bartolini
Stefano Bartolini
Abstract: How we should conceive of political Institutions? The listing of ‘which’ they are does not translate easily in ‘what’ they are. If we follow the traditions of considering institutions as norms and rules, political institutions are political norms and rules. What makes norms and rules political? In this short talk I will argue that political institutions should not be considered, and should be clearly separated, as norms and rules of conduct and from norms and rules of recognition. They should be regarded as norms/rules of conferral; norms/rules that confer prerogatives and powers not in the form of guaranteed individual powers (the rights to …) but in the form of collective powers. More precisely, a minimal or nuclear definition of political institutions is that they are rules/norms that allow the transformation of competing instigations into single commands (or merge competing instigations into a single command) whenever a membership or territorial group cannot survive if its individuals members respond positively to different instigations. In democratic experiences these norms/rules provide the taming principle for the necessarily concentrated coercive power. Effective political institutions (effective in generating power sharing) are achieved through 4 processes which analytically include two principles of inclusion (The circulation of the elite and the enlargement of politically relevant actor) and two principles of limitation (scope restraints and implementation restraints). The talk concludes by highlighting the exceptional character of this type of institutions with respect to all others: their primordiality, their weak normativity and sanctionability, their instability and contestedness, and their intentional inefficiency.
Bio: Stefano Bartolini, born in 1952, is a graduate in political science of the University of Florence. He has thought at the University of Bologna, Florence, Trieste and Geneva and at the he European University Institute. He was editor of the Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica and member of the scientific editorial board of several political science journals. He has been awarded the UNESCO Stein Rokkan prise for the Social sciences in 1990. He has directed the Robert Schumann Centre for advanced studies of the European University Institute. His research interests have focused on Western European political development, on electoral history and electoral behaviour, on European integration, on comparative methodology and on analytical political theory.
Affiliation: European University Institute, Florence, Italy
