DP16181 Culture, Institutions, and 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 changes in the environment and shifts in political power. Specifically, we
start with a culture set, which consists of attributes and the feasible connections between them.
Combinations of attributes produce cultural configurations, which provide meaning,
interpretation and justification for individual and group actions. Cultural figurations also
legitimize and support different institutional arrangements. Culture matters as it shapes the set of
feasible cultural figurations and via this channel institutions. Yet, changes in politics and
institutions can cause a rewiring of existing attributes, generating very different cultural
configurations. Cultural persistence may result from the dynamics of political and economic
factors - rather than being a consequence of an unchanging culture. We distinguish cultures by
how fluid they are - whereby more fluid cultures allow a richer set of cultural configurations.
Fluidity in turn depends on how specific (vs. abstract) and entangled (vs. free-standing) attributes
in a culture set are. We illustrate these ideas using examples from African, England, China, the
Islamic world, the Indian caste system and the Crow. In all cases, our interpretation highlights
that culture becomes more of a constraint when it is less fluid (more hardwired), for example
because its attributes are more specific or entangled. We also emphasize that less fluid cultures
are not necessarily "bad cultures", and may create a range of benefits, though they may reduce the
responsiveness of culture to changing circumstances. In many instances, including in the African,
Chinese and English cases, we show that there is a lot of fluidity and very different, almost
diametrically-opposed, cultural configurations are feasible, often compete with each other for
acceptance and can gain the upper hand depending on political factors.
