This paper presents a theoretical argument focused on how social norms and formal institutions operate as cognitive coping mechanisms among groupings of boundedly rational actors who face fundamental uncertainty concerning their political and economic environments.
This paper presents a broad framework for analyzing radical reform in terms of a large set of collective-action problems faced by potential reformers. It merges concepts that often appear separately in the literature, including social preferences, power relationships, policy subsystems, institutional stability, types of institutional change, and types of agents.