title: Evolutionary institutionalism.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Institutions are hard to define and hard to study. Long prominent in political science have been two theories: Rational Choice Institutionalism (RCI) and Historical Institutionalism (HI). Arising from the life sciences is now a third: Evolutionary Institutionalism (EI). Comparative strengths and weaknesses of these three theories warrant review, and the value-to-be-added by expanding the third beyond Darwinian evolutionary theory deserves consideration.
  
  
  OBJECTIVE
  Should evolutionary institutionalism expand to accommodate new understanding in ecology, such as might apply to the emergence of stability, and in genetics, such as might apply to political behavior?
  
  
  METHODS
  Core arguments are reviewed for each theory with more detailed exposition of the third, EI. Particular attention is paid to EI's gene-institution analogy; to variation, selection, and retention of institutional traits; to endogeneity and exogeneity; to agency and structure; and to ecosystem effects, institutional stability, and empirical limitations in behavioral genetics.
  
  
  RESULTS
  RCI, HI, and EI are distinct but complementary.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Institutional change, while amenable to rational-choice analysis and, retrospectively, to criticaljuncture and path-dependency analysis, is also, and importantly, ecological. Stability, like change, is an emergent property of institutions, which tend to stabilize after change in a manner analogous to allopatric speciation. EI is more than metaphorically biological in that institutional behaviors are driven by human behaviors whose evolution long preceded the appearance of institutions themselves.
authors.affiliation: Heidelberg University.
authors.forename: Dr Kai
authors.initials: DK
authors.lastname: Fürstenberg
mesh_terms: D001690:Biological Science Disciplines; D017753:Ecosystem; D019143:Evolution, Molecular; D006801:Humans; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D011057:Politics
keywords: Evolutionary Institutionalism; ecology; institutional change; institutions