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Abstract Over the last decade, there has been increased interest in understanding the design (i.e., content) of regulation as a basis for studying regulation formation, implementation, and outcomes. Within this line of research, scholars have been particularly interested in investigating regulatory dynamics relating to features and patterns of regulatory text and have engaged a variety of methodological approaches to support their assessments. One approach featured in this research is the Institutional Grammar (IG). The IG supports syntactic and semantic analyses of institutional statements (e.g., regulatory provisions) that embed within regulatory text. A recently revised version—called the IG 2.0—further supports robust analyses of regulatory text by offering an expanded feature set particularly well‐suited to extracting and classifying content relevant for the study of regulation. This paper (i) provides a brief introduction to the IG 2.0 and (ii) discusses theoretical and analytical advantages of using the IG 2.0 to study regulation. 

Abstract The way in which public policies are composed may lead to conflicts that manifest in an extended policymaking duration. This paper explores the associations between policy composition and the relative duration for policies to be adopted in 15 U.S. state legislatures. We treat policy passage duration as an indicator of policy conflicts in the legislative process. We adapt the institutional grammar tool (IGT) to examine how 168 oil and gas development policies are composed and gauge the association between the content of these policies and the speed of their adoption. We find policies that are more stringent, contain more constitutive rules, target issues related to oil and gas operations or tax and finance take relatively longer to pass. These findings offer theoretical insights into the relationships between policy composition and policy adoption duration. They also provide methodological insights on measuring policy design components using a semi‐automated application of the IGT. 

Abstract Public affairs scholars have contributed rich insights on the role and outcomes of institutions in policy and administrative settings. They have offered numerous empirical studies of these topics, alongside concepts and theories that can be leveraged in their assessment. But there remains a relative dearth in attention to approaches that can be used to support rigorous assessments of institutional design itself—those that support reliable and nuanced representations of institutional structure and meaning. The Institutional Grammar (IG) is one such approach that has gained in prominence over the last decade. Existing applications validate the IG's utility toward rigorous assessments of institutional design, and highlight the IG's value in operationalizing concepts relevant in policy and administration scholarship. We build on existing IG research by presenting a revised specification IG 2.0 for encoding and analyzing institutional design that responds to representational necessities and analytical opportunities within and beyond policy and administrative domains. 

Abstract The Institutional Grammar (IG) is used to analyse the syntactic structure of statements constituting institutions (e.g., policies, regulations, and norms) that indicate behavioural constraints and parameterize features of institutionally governed domains. Policy and administration scholars have made considerable progress in methodologically developing the IG, offering increasingly clear guidelines for IG‐based coding, identifying unique considerations for applying the IG to different types of institutions, and expanding its syntactic scope. However, while validated as a robust institutional analysis approach, the resource and time commitment associated with its application has precipitated concerns over whether the IG might ever enjoy widespread use. Needed now in the methodological development of the IG are reliable and accessible (i.e., open source) approaches that reduce the costs associated with its application. We propose an automated approach leveraging computational text analysis and natural language processing. We then present results from an evaluation in the context of food system regulations. 

Game theory is used by all behavioral sciences, but its development has long centered around the economic interpretation of equilibrium outcomes in relatively simple games and toy systems. But game theory has another potential use: the high-level design of large game compositions that express complex architectures and represent real-world institutions faithfully. Compositional game theory, grounded in the mathematics underlying programming languages, and introduced here as a general computational framework, increases the parsimony of game representations with abstraction and modularity, accelerates search and design, and helps theorists across disciplines express real-world institutional complexity in well-defined ways. Relative to existing approaches in game theory, compositional game theory is especially promising for solving game systems with long-range dependencies, for comparing large numbers of structurally related games, and for nesting games into the larger logical or strategic flows typical of real world policy or institutional systems.