Political Institutions

Abstract

There is so much misunderstanding surrounding institutional analysis that discussion of the study of Soviet political institutions must be preceded by an attempt to clear up some of the conceptual confusion or, at the very least, to clarify and justify the way in which the term ‘political institution’ will be used in the present context. The term itself is by no means so free from ambiguity as its firm position in the basic vocabulary of political science might lead one to suppose. Its meaning is sometimes restricted to cover only those legal institutions whose names appear in the written constitutions of countries which possess such a document. It is often used much more broadly to become virtually synonymous with ‘political organization’, a usage in which it embraces not only formal institutions of government and political parties, but even pressure groups. It is sometimes used more broadly still, in a more sociological sense, to indicate an established pattern of behaviour. Thus, the statement that ‘dissent’ has become ‘institutionalised’ within a society may mean no more than that dissent is regarded as normal, that over a reasonable period of time it has been accepted within the political order, and that it has become one of the established modes of political behaviour. In this usage, there may or may not be formal institutions, such as an independent judiciary, who are charged with maintaining rights of dissent.