Institutional Decay

Extracted Attributes

• Key Theorist

  Niall Ferguson

• Field of Study

  History, Political Science, Economics, Sociology

• Associated Book

  The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die

• Core Definition

  The decline and weakening of established organizations and systems, characterized by a slow loss of effectiveness, integrity, or relevance over time.

• Symptoms/Consequences

  Decreased competence, credibility, legitimacy; economic downgrades, social disintegration, conflict, humanitarian crises.

• Primary Focus (Ferguson)

  Decline of Western Europe and North America's post-World War II economic and political supremacy

• Mechanism of Decay (General)

  Internal rigidity, external pressures, erosion of trust, decreased motivation to comply, failure to adapt to social/economic changes, intellectual rigidity, entrenched political actors, increasing over-complexity.

Timeline

• According to Niall Ferguson, the post-World War II era marks the beginning of the fading economic and political supremacy of Western Europe and North America, indicative of institutional decay. (Source: Summary, Wikipedia)

  1945-XX-XX

• Niall Ferguson publishes 'The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die', arguing that Western institutions are in decline. (Source: Summary, Wikipedia)

  2013-XX-XX

• A failed assassination attempt on Donald Trump in Pennsylvania highlights Secret Service failures, interpreted as a symptom of broader institutional decay within US government agencies, potentially influenced by charged political rhetoric. (Source: Summary, Document fad27814-4fde-4a37-810c-0a85edbfd192)

  2024-07-13

• The Republican National Convention (RNC) in Milwaukee showcases the Republican Party's transformation towards populism and a departure from interventionist foreign policy, discussed in relation to institutional decay. (Source: Summary, Document fad27814-4fde-4a37-810c-0a85edbfd192)

  2024-07-15

• Challenges within the venture capital market, including issues of liquidity and regulatory oversight, are viewed as manifestations of institutional decay in the financial sector. (Source: Summary, Document fad27814-4fde-4a37-810c-0a85edbfd192)

  2024-XX-XX

The Great Degeneration

The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die is a 2013 book by the British historian Niall Ferguson, in which the author argues that following the conclusion of World War II, the economic and political supremacy of Western Europe and North America is fading rapidly. He believes that the West is in decline. Ferguson describes an "institutional malaise" that is threatening 500 years of development in the West. Financial Times reviewer Samuel Brittan said the book offers "an informative and enjoyable read."

Web Search Results

• Institutional Decay → Term - Climate → Sustainability Directory

  This failure might stem from internal rigidity or external pressures they cannot handle. Another aspect is the erosion of trust. As an institution becomes less effective or perceived as less honest, the trust placed in it by stakeholders diminishes, further hindering its operation. Institutional decay is the slow loss of effectiveness and integrity within an organization or system. [...] Understanding institutional decay begins with grasping its most basic meaning. Simply put, it describes a process where organizations or systems designed to serve a specific purpose gradually lose their effectiveness, integrity, or relevance over time. This isn’t a sudden collapse but a slow erosion, akin to a building succumbing to weathering and neglect. The fundamental definition involves the gradual weakening of an institution’s core functions and its capacity to deliver on its stated [...] At the academic and expert level, the meaning of institutional decay transcends simple definitions or intermediate descriptions of mechanisms. It represents a complex, dynamic process characterized by the systemic erosion Meaning → Systemic erosion, in the context of sustainability, refers to the gradual degradation and weakening of interconnected systems—environmental, social, and economic—that support ecological balance and societal well-being. of an institution’s capacity, legitimacy, and

• [PDF] How Institutions Decay: Towards an Endogenous Theory - PhilArchive

  need to be generally and robustly complied with. In other words, institutions are strong only when people have a surplus of motivation to comply (Hindriks 2022). Against this background, institutional decay can be characterized as a process during which an institution becomes weaker. If the institution was strong to begin with, this initially means merely that people become less motivated to comply, even though they still do so. However, there comes a point at which the degree of compliance [...] Decay: A Goal Framing Explanation The explanations of institutional decay that we propose all revolve around motivation of the members of an organization, which can change even in the absence of exogeneous changes (e.g. budget cuts). In particular, the idea is that the extent to which they support its goals and values and comply with its institutions decreases. Because of this, we need a theory that specifies under which conditions this motivation arises and why this motivation may fade. To [...] collective distortion of vision which, together with external pressures not to delay the launch, lead to the disaster. Third, some studies developed formal models that cover institutional decay. Greif (2006) models the erosion of reputation systems. Here, the core mechanism of institutional decay is that decline (in the sense of decreasing contributions) is caused by newcomers who join a functioning system. Newcomers have an incentive to freeride (exploiting the trust-based system), because the

• Political decay - Wikipedia

  Under the framework of political development as institutional development, political decay occurs when institutions fail to change or adapt when they become unnecessary due to social or economic changes. Dan Halvorson") challenges the idea of political decay as an institutional failure by claiming that the idea of political decay is tied to a Western ideal of political institution without taking into account widely-varying cultural institutions and the inability of post-colonial states to adapt [...] to Western ideals. Francis Fukuyama refers to political decay as the social and economic forces that upset the equilibrium of established political order. Institutions of the Roman Empire government failed to meet the moral and economic needs of the citizens, resulting in the conditions that would facilitate political decay and the fall of the Roman state. Under the institutional model, political decay can be observed as a decrease in competence, credibility and establishment of institutional [...] ### Institutional [edit]

• The Decay of American Political Institutions

  There are many diagnoses of America’s current woes. In my view, there is no single “silver bullet” cause of institutional decay, or of the more expansive notion of decline. In general, however, the historical context of American political development is all too often given short shrift in much analysis. If we look more closely at American history as compared to that of other liberal democracies, we notice three key structural characteristics of American political culture that, however they [...] any political institutions in the United States are decaying. This is not the same thing as the broader phenomenon of societal or civilization decline, which has become a highly politicized topic in the discourse about America. Political decay in this instance simply means that a specific political process—sometimes an individual government agency—has become dysfunctional. This is the result of intellectual rigidity and the growing power of entrenched political actors that prevent reform and [...] rebalancing. This doesn’t mean that America is set on a permanent course of decline, or that its power relative to other countries will necessarily diminish. Institutional reform is, however, an extremely difficult thing to bring about, and there is no guarantee that it can be accomplished without a major disruption of the political order. So while decay is not the same as decline, neither are the two discussions unrelated.

• Collapse. Institutional Decline and Breakdown, Its Endogeneity and ...

  But also below the global level of decline and sneaking collapse, there are ample symptoms of institutional decline and collapse at national and local levels, with subsequent economic downgrades, excessive and cumulating income and wealth inequalities, social disintegration and conflict, spatial fragmentation, humanitarian crises as to food, health, water, land, or shelter access, to violence and wars, and subsequent enforced, uprooting and disembedding migration. [...] good old “market-economy institutions.” Evolutionary and institutional economics has focused on institutional emergence, evolution, and persistent structures, but still not so much on decline and collapse. I develop an endogenous explanation of institutional decline and collapse implied by the previous success of institutionalized cooperation and increasing (over-)complexity, which exceeds individual cognitive capacities. Institutional adaptability and problem-solving capacity then decline. [...] Decline and collapse of institutional structures and, with this, of entire socio-economies and often their natural ecologies as well, have occurred over thousands of years of human history (e.g., Tainter Citation 2003; Turchin Citation 2003; Diamond Citation 2005).Footnote 1 We know of famous ancient cases of such collapse and even complete extinction in the interaction of institutions (namely ceremonially warranted ones) and _natural environment_, such as the Easter Island. More recently, we