Policy Failure and Institutional Reform: Why Should Form Follow Function?

The article presents information on policy failure and institutional reforms. Sympathizing with the design philosophy in general, and even more with the notion that the goodness of fit with a given institutional structure is an important precondition of policy success. The link between institutional conditions and the substance of public policy is more easily perceived in practice than established in empirical research. The reason is anticipation, participants in the policy-making process tend to be expert judges of institutional feasibility, and policy proposals violating institutional constraints tend to remain in the limbo of non-observable "non-decisions." Nevertheless, practitioners know that their policy choices are often constrained by existing institutional conditions and, even if definitive proof according to the canons of empirical social science research is often very difficult to establish, it is possible to specify theoretically the conditions under which this should be so