Corrado Roversi - Three Layers of Institutional Power скачать в хорошем качестве

Corrado Roversi - Three Layers of Institutional Power

Contemporary social ontology typically connects institutional power with rules and collective acceptance. This is a normative meaning of the term “power”, which hardly covers all the instances of power relevant for social ontology (e.g., charismatic, parental, traditional, brute power). “Power” will be meant here as the factual capacity to influence intentionally other people’s behaviour. This notion—inspired by Foucault—is not normative but causal, and it is purposely broad. In this paper, I will introduce a distinction between three kinds of power relevant for an institutional domain and show that two of these three are inherently vague entities. In line with previous writings, I will distinguish among three-layers of an institution: institutional, meta-institutional, and para-institutional. While the institutional layer encompasses the institution’s constitutive rules, the meta-institutional layer consists in the deeper social conventions in which that institution finds its meaning and purpose, while the para-institutional layer includes phenomena that emerge from its actual practice. Hence, if chess is an institution, competitive game-playing is the relevant meta-institution, whereas a gambit and other entities of chess theory are part of the relevant para-institution. Three kinds of power can be distinguished in light of this three-dimensional framework for social ontology. Institutional power is based on the collective acceptance of status-creating rules: the power of a bishop to take another piece in chess, the power of the Parliament to enact statutes in law. Meta-institutional power, instead, depends on the deeper background practice in which the institution is embedded: in chess, the power of a player to end the game in case of cheating—a power that is not explicitly stated in the rules of the game but that is given for granted. In law, the notion of a “basic norm” to end the regress of formal validity (in Kelsen and Hart, for example) can be traced to this kind of meta-institutional power. Powers of this kind are inherently vague because they are not codified. Para-institutional power amounts to an indirect influence on people’s behaviour based not on the actual rules, but on the way in which people will actually behave—due to strategic reasons, or simply in virtue of behavioural dispositions—given the rules. A kind of para-institutional power is exercised when, rather than imposing anti-seismic renovations, I introduce tax deductions for them, but also “nudge-like” regulations fall in this category. Para-institutional power, too, is inherently vague, but for a reason different than in the case of meta-institutional power. The problem here is that it is not always clear whether the social consequences generated by collective behaviour in the light an institution’s rules were intended outcomes or not. If, for example, strong tax deductions for renovations in residence houses lead to lowered rent rates, thus convincing people to invest in public bonds rather than real estate and increasing the amount of public debt shared among citizens, was this intentional or accidental? This vagueness opens for a high degree of backward-looking “conspiracy theories”, a phenomenon that has been particularly apparent during the COVID pandemic.