by Erik Jones

Why Institutions Matter and Yet People Still Choose to Break Them: A Collection

When Donald J. Trump came back into power, his team brought along a 900+ page programme for dismantling the institutions of government. There is a certain irony to that. Trump’s team clearly hates ‘bureaucracy’, but you need a lot of staff and a substantial organizational structure to produce a 900+ page edited volume. The irony only deepens when you realize how much time the people who contributed to that volume have thought about both the institutions of government and the institutions created to help people think about the institutions of government.

These are not people who hate institutions, procedure, hierarchy, or specialisation. On the contrary, their success in planning and then executing their ‘presidential transition project’ – also known as Project 2025 – rests on the collective effort of ‘hundreds of volunteers’ including ‘the chapter authors and contributors’, the dedication of ‘the Heritage Foundation’s management and policy teams’, a ‘formidable team of editors’, and an impressive array of experts in the presentation of data, web and print design, graphic design, marketing, and fundraising. That is not to mention all the other people stretching from the ‘dedicated junior staff’ to the leadership of the Heritage Foundation, including its ‘advisory board member organisations’. The celebration of these individuals, groups, and organisations appears on the very first page of text, with the list of member institutions on the two pages that follow.

Clearly, the people who produced Project 2025 recognise the importance of institutions. Nevertheless, they invested a lot of institutional resources – time, money, expertise, organisational effort – to come up with a plan to break many of those institutions at the core of the United States government. They insist that what unites them ‘is the drive to make our country better’. Breaking the government is less a war against bureaucracy than an effort to replace one set of institutions with another.

There is nothing particularly new about what the Trump team is doing. Lots of politicians come to power with policy teams intent on changing the institutions they govern. What is surprising is the energy they have put into breaking institutions, the self-confidence they express in their potential to build something new and different on those broken foundations, and the risks they are willing to accept during the period between the existing institutional arrangement and its (eventual) successor.

This packet of essays explores those more surprising elements in the Trump administration’s new agenda. My goal is not to provide a close analysis of the second Trump administration. Almost all these essays were written before Trump came to office the first time around, let alone the second. Instead, I want to use arguments developed over the past three decades to explain why I think what they are doing is more difficult and more dangerous than the text of Project 2025 or the bold speeches and strategy documents of the second Trump administration would suggest.

The collection has three parts. The first focuses on why institutions matter by underscoring just how difficult it is to tear them down once they are in place. The second shifts the focus from institutions to the people who run them. The third highlights the risks involved in this kind of radical unmaking of institutions and concludes by asking why anyone would want to support that agenda.

The Sources of Institutional Resilience

When I started looking at institutions, my goal was to understand the source of their resilience. I was writing a doctoral dissertation on how changing patterns of political competition in Belgium and the Netherlands influenced the possibilities of macroeconomic policymaking. What I noticed along the way is that a lot of things can change in politics, but the political institutions themselves remain resilient – particularly as those institutions extend from politics into other parts of economic and social life.

At first, I imagined that perceived resilience might just be some kind of inertia. My dissertation ended with a radical change in the politics of both countries and a prediction – since borne out – that things would only get more complicated as time progressed. But as I looked across countries in Western Europe, I noticed something peculiar.

Those West European countries were and still are among the most exposed to global market forces. They are also pioneers in the development of transnational institutional arrangements like the European Union (EU). You would expect those countries to start to look more like each other over time as common and powerful external market forces force them to converge on a common set of arrangements. But that is not what you see. Instead, they remain stubbornly different, one from the next. As in Belgium and the Netherlands, their politics can break down and yet they are unlikely to converge beyond a limited degree. If anything, Belgium and the Netherlands have become more different as their political transformations have deepened. Indeed, the only way European integration can move forward is by recognising the inevitability of that country-by-country distinctiveness.

Unsurprisingly, there is not much that is new in this observation. Karl Polanyi (an anthropologist) and Gunnar Myrdal (an economist) both observed something similar in the 1940s and 1950s. They explained that the resilience of institutions lies in how institutions reflect social values as well as specific functional requirements (Polanyi) and how those institutions connect with and build upon each other in complicated ways within the same political environment (Myrdal). This combination of factors not only explains why it is hard to break institutions, but also why it is hard to replace them once they are broken. The challenge is not just to find a coalition strong enough to create a new institution that shares the same values as well as the same functional requirements, but also to come up with an institutional design that does not conflict with those other institutions that still exist.

Those observations may not be new, but they are important. This is something that West Europeans had to learn the hard way, and it explains why the European project went through so many fits and starts. Each new institution they added at the European level had to offer something for everyone; it also had to accept or ignore that not all countries would adapt to the new arrangement in the same way (or at all, in some cases). And, it meant that Europeans had a hard time projecting their influence into other countries. We spend a lot of time talking about the ‘Brussels Effect’ and the EU’s success as a regulatory superpower, and not enough time focusing on the failure of the EU’s early attempts at imposing ‘beyond the border’ conditionality as part of the Doha Round of the Trade and Development talks in the first decade of the 21st Century. Institutions are everywhere resilient. This explains why there are limits to the scope for European integration.

Having said, that, however, resilience is not the same as permanence. The liberal international system collapsed twice in the early 20th Century. The Soviet communist system broke down as well. Hence it is worth asking how that could happen. It is also worth thinking about what comes next.

The Sources of Institutional Change

The answers to those questions force us to focus on the role of human agency in forcing the pace of institutional change. Specifically, we should focus on two factors: the elites responsible for making institutions work, and the ideas those elites use to justify their actions to themselves and to their followers. The usual story is that the elites responsible for making institutions work have an interest in preserving their privileged position. In turn, they justify both their tenacity in power and the role they play by highlighting both the functions that the institution offers and the values that it reflects. They also underscore how what they do supports others in similar privileged positions. This is how we go from individual elites to a ruling class. The only trick is to ensure an adequate circulation of elites to hold off the threat of revolution. Gaetano Mosca (a political scientist) was an early influence on my work in this space.

This logic of elite solidarity and self-justification underpins the structural realist tradition in international relations theory. You do not need to know how the state functions; you just need to assume that the people who lead the state will pursue the ‘national interest’. So long as the ruling class is united, those incentives that shape the national interest will give you a good basis for predicting how ‘the state’ will behave. The same logic also guides our understanding of collective action at the national level. Each new organisation finds a role to play in the ecosystem of those that already exist. There may be some jostling for marginal benefits, but absent some powerful shock we should expect the number of these groups to increase and their hold over society and politics to harden. In this way, both structural realism in the international sphere and the logic of collective action in the domestic sphere lead us to expect that things are not going to be easy to change.

But that expectation can be mistaken. Sometimes the people in charge do not identify either with their roles or their institutions. Sometimes the whole ruling class loses faith in its own stories about why they are in power and what incentives they face. When that happens, they might lose the willingness to put down protests in other countries or to use violence in enforcing their rule at home. Worse, they might see an advantage in using their position of privilege to steal public assets or find other ways to enrich themselves personally. When that happens, the ‘national interest’ is not a good basis for predicting their behaviour, and neither is the preservation of institutions per se. Indeed, they may have been what happened to the Soviet system. While the people protested, the elites simply pillaged the country to set themselves up with a different kind of privileged position.

Then again, it is hard to make strong parallels between what happened in Central and Eastern Europe under communism and what happened to the countries of Western Europe during the process of European integration. While communism failed, the (West) European project has proven surprisingly resilient both nationally and at the regional level. Indeed, that resilience is not an accident. Just think of the European rescue of the nation state.

The challenge when thinking about the European Union is to imagine what would really constitute a ‘crisis’ of the sort that brought down Soviet communism. Europeans love to talk about ‘crisis’ as a sort of engine for integration. But that kind of crisis and the kind of existential dilemma Soviet communism faced that brought the Cold War to end probably are not the same.

This is another place where the sources of institutional resilience in values and complementarities come into play. Perhaps the kind of crisis the EU typically faces is functionally specific. Think about an energy shock, an agricultural protest, an influx of migration, or a bank failure. These are big events – and European institutions have often struggled to respond to them – but the Soviet Union survived similar shocks and arguably worse. The explanation for this resilience is simple enough. While Europe may struggle in one area, it continues to offer solutions, reflect aspirations, and work reasonably effectively in many other ways. Europe can experience crisis without facing an existential threat in that sense.

What would be worse is if the complementarities across different parts of the European project suddenly worked in a different way, making other functions worse rather than better. It would also hurt if different parts of Europe suddenly identified things they didn’t like in each other or their common project rather than embracing them as values they share. Then the EU might face a crisis of the sort that Soviet communism faced. The two arrangements are of course very different, but the logic of the argument is the same.

If Europe were to face such a dynamic, we might expect to see the elites in charge of specific institutions acting in ways that undermine rather than strengthening how those institutions work. Moreover, we could expect this kind of self-sabotage to happen any level of government. And there is no reason to restrict that possibility to Europe; we should also expect to see that kind of behaviour in the United States. And we do. That is what the whole debate about the crisis of democracy is about. The problem is not just that people have lost faith in the system; it is that the people how are elected to run the system do not want those institutions to work – either because they want something different or because they see more advantages for themselves in playing the role as spoiler. This is where the Project 2025 team comes back into this picture.

The problem with this kind of spoiler behaviour is that it reverberates across institutions and different levels of aggregation – meaning both up to the international level and down to the local and regional levels. In turn, this reverberation is what makes the functional complementarities that made institutions more resilient in one context and transforms them into sources of fragility or weakness in another. To understand how it is necessary to go back to that original work by Karl Polanyi and Gunnar Myrdal. Together, they offer a framework not only for understanding what a real existential crisis might look like but also how we would know it is happening in empirical terms.

The attractive aspect of this kind of theorizing is that it helps us to point to data that can support calls for alarm as well as reasons for reassurance. More important, we can now build the study of institutions into something that shows the kind of systems dynamics we observe in real life. As we do, it becomes easier to appreciate just how challenging it is to maintain political systems for extended periods. It also becomes easier to anticipate the challenges we would face if we suddenly dismantled one arrangement without having another to replace it. Here to the experience of the end of the Cold War is instructive in many ways.

The Power of Entropy

The greatest lesson to come out of the Cold War is that it is easier to break down a political system than to build up a new one – even with the best of intentions and a healthy dose of external support. Moreover, this is true at the international level and not just in the context of domestic politics. The old bipolar world order and the rules-based multilateral liberal Western international system required enormous energy to create and maintain. When the Cold War ended, many people no longer saw the incentives to make that kind of investment in time and energy. Instead, they chose to focus on more domestic concerns. That stands to reason. But it should come as no surprise that energy leaked out of the system, putting increasing strain on institutions at all levels. This strain was different from the pressures for convergence that I started discussing in this packet. The incentives countries face now are to be more different and not more similar. Existing institutional differences only reinforce those incentives.

You can see the impact of these pressures most clearly in the transatlantic relationship. The problem is not just that the two sides of the Atlantic are equally self-absorbed, but also that they are seeking to use their economic and security relationships in ways that shift burdens or adjustment costs from one side of the Atlantic to another. Donald Trump did not create this dynamic and Joe Biden little to reverse it. Worse, the team that drafted Project 2025 regards the European Union as an adversary of the United States. That was clear even before Trump was re-elected. It is even more clear now that he is back in office.

What is disturbing in all this is that the people who voted for Trump did so knowing – or at least suspecting – that he would come to office with this kind of an agenda. Of course, Trump did what he could to distance himself and his campaign from Project 2025, and the polling data did show that the document and the agenda it outlined were both unpopular. But everyone could not have been fooled by that dissemblance and yet they voted for Trump, nonetheless. And Trump and his team are hardly alone in wanted to tear down institutions. Given the advantages that we know institutions bring, why would people vote to see them dismantled and what makes the authors of Project 2025 think the same people would commit the energy required to replace them in the United States, across the Atlantic, or in the international system?

I don’t really have an answer to that question – just a set of hypotheses. Clearly there is more work to do in this space.

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An Acrobat version of this packet with the essays attached is available upon request.