Final Report Summary - ITEPE (Institutional Transformation in European Political Economy- A Socio-Legal Approach)
Why do societies regularly experience socio-economic crisis, as for example was the case in the interwar period, in the 1970s and since 2007? The counter institutive answer of the ITEPE project is that such crisis has relatively little to do with economy or political ideology but a lot to do with law and the type of regulation which is institutionalized at a given moment. All three crises were preceded by gradual erosion in the capacity of law to regulate and stabilize the relations between the economic and political spheres of society within the framework of intermediary institutions. Such erosions can be traced back to structural changes in the composition of society which the legal setup has not adequately reacted to thereby rendering existing institutional setups ineffective. The crisis can therefore also be understood as emerging from “an institutional backlog”.