IDRG
Institutional Dysfunction Research Group
Researching why institutions persist, adapt, and underperform.
The core question
Why do institutions that fail continue to exist in the form they do?
Mission
IDRG studies institutional dysfunction as a political outcome rather than as a residual category for things that did not work. It examines how rules, incentives, and discretion combine to produce arrangements that underperform consistently, and asks who those arrangements serve.
Vision
To build a collaborative research community producing empirical and comparative work on institutions and governance across the Global South, developed from cases rather than imported to them, and legible enough that findings in one setting can be read against another.
Research programme
What the group studies.
Institutional persistence
Why particular arrangements endure when performance alone cannot explain their survival.
Institutional dysfunction
Dysfunction examined as an outcome with identifiable beneficiaries.
Political incentives
How incentives shape what institutions are permitted to do, and what they are permitted to fail at.
Bureaucratic politics
Administrative behaviour, discretion, and implementation as the site where rules meet interests.
Rent extraction and distribution
How arrangements generate and allocate advantage, and how that feeds back into durability.
Institutional adaptation
The conditions under which institutions adjust, reform, or decline.
Comparative politics of the Global South
Building theory from cases rather than treating them as tests of frameworks developed elsewhere.
Projects
Current work and proposed directions.
Current work is research already underway. Proposed projects are directions the group intends to develop; they do not yet exist.
Current work
The Profits of Dysfunction
Working paper on political incentives and institutional failure in South Asia.
Proposed projects
A structured repository of cases where formally existing institutions repeatedly underperform.
An anonymised archive of accounts from people navigating institutions, built to research ethics standards.
Comparative case studies examining how institutions persist despite poor performance.
Research on reforms that change formal rules but may or may not change underlying incentives and outcomes.
Longer-term comparative research across the Global South.
Methods
How the work is done.
Interviews
Semi-structured interviewing with people inside and around institutions.
Case studies
Cases developed carefully enough to carry analytical weight.
Comparative analysis
Reading cases against one another to separate the general from the particular.
Qualitative coding
Thematic analysis and structured coding of interview material.
Quantitative analysis
Survey and policy data analysis using R and SPSS.
Policy and document analysis
Reading formal rules, mandates, and reform documents against observed practice.
Questions
What the group is trying to answer.
How the group works
Intended activities.
IDRG is at an early stage. This describes how it is designed to operate as it forms, not a schedule of events that has already run.
Research discussions
Regular discussion of work in progress, framed around the argument rather than the polish.
Working papers
Developing drafts toward circulation, with structured internal review.
Collaborative projects
Joint work where questions overlap and a shared design beats parallel effort.
Literature discussions
Close reading of the work the group builds on and argues with.
Case development
Building cases to a standard that supports comparison.
Methodological exchange
Practical discussion of design, measurement, and inference.
Work on the problem with us.
If these questions are close to what you already think about, the group is open to you.