Informal Institutions, Institutional Change, and Gender Equality

This paper makes two claims: insights from gender research improve understandings of informal institutions and institutional change, and studying informal institutions helps scholars understand the gap between formal institutional change and outcomes. Informed by institutional analysis and feminist institutionalist scholarship, it explores the relationship between informal institutions, institutional change, and gender equality, using gender equality to scrutinize issues central to institutional change, demonstrating that institutional analyses improve when gender dynamics are incorporated. Showing the gendering of power relations highlights power in institutional change in new ways, improving understandings of why institutional change rarely happens as intended by institutional designers.