Culture, Institutions and Social Equilibria: A Framework

This paper proposes a new framework for studying the interplay between culture and institutions. We follow the recent sociology literature and interpret culture as a "repertoire", which allows rich cultural responses to political changes. Specifically, we start with a culture set, which consists of attributes and feasible connections between them. Combinations of attributes produce cultural configurations, which provide social meaning, coordination and political justification both at the individual and the group level. Culture matters as it shapes the set of feasible cultural configurations and institutional arrangements. Our framework has several distinctive features relative to the new cultural economics literature. First, it adopts a "systems approach" to culture, in that the meaning and function of given attributes are determined within the whole configuration and political equilibrium. Second, it emphasizes discontinuous or "saltational" changes in culture—rather than gradual, evolutionary changes—as attributes are rewired and acquire new meanings in response to evolving circumstances and as outcomes in ongoing "cultural struggles". Third, our framework puts the spotlight on how fluidly different cultures can respond to new environments, depending on the nature of their attributes and constraints on their rewirings. Finally, it enriches the study of the co-determination of political and cultural outcomes.