Beyond Hierarchies and Networks: Institutional Logics and Change in Trans-Boundary Political Spaces
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In almost all subfields of political science in the last third of the twentieth century, it was claimed that we are witnessing a transformation of political order from hierarchies to networks. This paper traces institutional change during the twentieth century by examining structures and modes of interaction in transboundary regions in Europe and North America. First, it challenges functionalist explanations of institution-building and institutional change. Instead, the impact of general discourses and ideas is highlighted. Second, it takes a closer look at the hierarchies-to-networks transformation thesis. Whereas this thesis can be confirmed if we define hierarchies and networks as patterns of interaction, if we define hierarchies and networks in terms of modes of interaction this is less certain. De jure, institutional elements implying a “hierarchical order” have been supplanted in newer institutions by provisions allowing for “majority voting.” De facto, nothing has changed, since these modes of interaction have never actually been used. In practice, the only way to achieve joint action has always been and still is through “agreement” or “consent.” What has changed over the years, though, is the institutionalized approach to reaching “agreement.” The older approach uses a technocratic-deductive logic. In recent years, we have been able to observe various new approaches in cross-border regions: a symbolic-inductive logic in Western Europe, a utilitarian-evolutionary logic along the U.S.-Mexican border, and a normative-constructivist logic along the U.S.-Canadian border. Based on the empirical findings, I conclude that institutional theory should pay more attention to the fact that many political institutions provide orientation, shape identities, and mobilize activities through emotional symbols.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".