Under the new director, IGS will sharpen its research focus in the areas of institutional design and political reform. IGS will continue its work in that direction for the foreseeable future. The basic questions underlying this research concern the purposes of political reform, the ways that institutional incentives promote desirable behavior, and the specific policy recommendations that follow from this analysis. Such investigations are necessarily interdisciplinary. Game theory and public choice analytics deriving from the economic tradition explore strategic incentives and their relationship to rules.
Legal studies illuminate the constitutional issues that are often inherent in reform proposals.
Historical research traces the evolutionary path of political institutions, addressing the pitfalls of a purely static analysis. Empirical political science and journalistic reporting collect information and test propositions about how institutions perform. In the past, IGS has encouraged both basic and applied research approaches. It will continue this tradition. Examples of the former are our commitment to the positive political theory and American political development working groups.