Institutional approach in study of Indian Politics
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Institutional approaches to household bargaining refer to attempts by nonneoclassical economists, sociologists, and anthropologists to account for the specificities of the household as an institutional form. These see households as an institutional response to the human need for long-term stable environments in which to bear and bring up children, to care, and be cared for, through sickness, disability, and old age and to plan for the future in a world characterized by uncertainty. What gives the household its institutional advantage in achieving these goals is the close intertwining of emotions and interests that characterize its relationships. Despite the different forms households take in different parts of the world, its relationships are generally familial. Its members are related by blood or marriage, they have lived together over considerable periods of time, they care for each other, and in any case, trust each other more than they trust strangers.
However, cooperative behavior within the household is not left entirely to the spontaneous impulse of members. It is also underwritten by a series of ‘implicit contracts’ that spell out the claims and obligations of different members to each other. Given the importance of the activities carried out within the family to the reproduction of social life in the wider society, these contracts typically embody social norms and beliefs about the meaning of the family in different cultural contexts. And given the importance of gender relationships in the key activities of the family, contracts between women and men within the family typically embody social norms and beliefs about gender differences in the wider society.
As long as household members have more to gain from their membership of the household than from going it alone, they have an incentive to abide by the terms of intrahousehold contracts, including its rules about decision-making. However, when these gains are less certain, how household members respond, whether or how they seek to achieve more favorable outcomes, will depend on what they are stand to gain from such action compared with what they stand to lose. Institutional approaches to cooperation and conflict within the household differ from neoclassical approaches in two important ways. First of all, they explain the rationale for cooperation within the family in affective and contractual terms rather than purely instrumentalist ones. Household members do not make decisions and seek to bargain as unrelated individuals, differentiated only by their resource endowments, but as members of families, with ascribed roles and responsibilities. Familial connections also mean that what individual members value about their membership of particular households, and hence what they stand to lose, cannot be captured by a materialist calculus alone. Nelson (1996), for instance, suggests that along with concerns with material well-being, household members will also seek to balance their need for ‘affiliation,’ the need to love and belong, with the value they attach to ‘agency,’ the capacity to define and act in their own interests. These different dimensions of well-being often involve trade-offs so that an individual may gain greater ‘agency’ by withdrawing from the household but have to sacrifice affectivity or material well-being.
At the same time, there may be situations where members may feel strongly enough about a decision to seek to influence its outcome. Because such action can, in certain cases, lead to open conflict, the likelihood of it happening will be determined partly by the extent to which the member, or members, in question feel able to jeopardize their membership of the household, in other words, on the strength of their fall-back positions. The second important difference between institutional and neoclassical approaches to bargaining relates to how they conceptualize differences in fall-back positions. While the primary focus of neoclassical approaches has been on differences in individual economic resources, institutional analysis emphasizes the much wider range of constraints and possibilities which reflect the household as a specific institutional form and create social differentials among individual members, or categories of members.