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Formal Rules in Institutional Transitions: An Examination Based on the Meiji Restoration and the Xinhai Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 March 2014

Masahiko AOKI
Masahiko AOKI*
Affiliation:
Tomoye and Henri Takahashi Professor Emeritus, Senior Fellow, Stanford University
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Abstract

This paper focuses on the roles of formal rules (laws) in institutional emergence, sustenance, crisis, and transition based on an examination of the Meiji Restoration and the Xinhai Revolution. It describes how formal rules in the polities of Qing China and Tokugawa Japan were enforced, supplemented, or modified by the strategic interactions among the ruler, the intermediate organizations, and the peasantry. It then discusses how the strategic complementarities between the ruler and the intermediate organizations were transformed into strategic rivalries in response to changes in the economic and foreign environments, resulting in the demise of dynastic rule in each country. The post-transition constitutional design was affected by the ways in which the strategic reconfigurations had led to the demise of the dynastic rulers. This historical narrative suggests that formal rules per se do not necessarily create institutions in the sense of an integral pattern and process of social behaviour and ideas. A formal rule can function as a substantive form of an institutional process if, and only if, it mediates between a recursive state of strategic interactions among agents and individual belief formation in order to sustain the social order.

Keywords

formal ruleendogenous institutional changeinstitutional complementarityMeiji RestorationXinhai Revolution
Type
Comparative and Empirical Approaches of Socio–Legal Research on Asia
Information
Asian Journal of Law and Society , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , May 2014 , pp. 31 - 54
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and KoGuan Law School, Shanghai Jiao Tong University 

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Footnotes

*

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at Stanford University, Harvard Business School, University of Tokyo, GRIPS (Tokyo), Jiaotong University (Shanghai), European University Institute (Italy), and the 2013 GROE Workshop at the University of Hertfordshire. I thank the participants at these workshops/seminars for discussions, as well as Debin Ma, Wolfgang Keller, Carsten Herrmann-Pillath, Francis Fukuyama, and Ji Weidong for helpful discussions and critical comments on earlier drafts. I also benefited from careful and competent editorial work by Nancy Hearst. Of course, I alone am responsible for all the statements in the paper as well as for any possible remaining errors.

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