A sleeping giant awakes? The rise of the Institutional Grammar Tool (IGT) in policy research

The Institutional Grammar Tool (IGT) is an important and relatively recent innovation in policy theory and analysis. It is conceptualized to empirically operationalize the insights of the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework. In the last decade, political scientists have offered a number of applications of the IGT, mainly focused on disclosing and scrutinizing in-depth the textual configurations of policy documents. These efforts, involving micro-level analyses of syntax as well as more general classifications of institutional statements according to rule types, have underpinned empirical projects mainly in the area of environmental and common-pool resources. Applications of IGT are still in their infancy, yet the growing momentum is sufficient for us to review what has been learned so far. We take stock of this recent, fast-growing literature, analyzing a corpus of 26 empirical articles employing IGTs published between 2008 and 2017. We examine them in terms of their empirical domain, hypotheses, and methods of selection and analysis of institutional statements. We find that the existing empirical applications do not add much to explanation, unless they are supported by research questions and hypotheses grounded in theory. We offer three conclusions. First, to exploit the IGT researchers need to go beyond the descriptive, computational approach that has dominated the field until now. Second, IGT studies grounded in explicit hypotheses have more explanatory leverage, and therefore, should be encouraged when adopting the tool outside the Western world. Third, by focusing on rules, researchers can capture findings that are more explanatory and less microscopic.