Institutions preserve and facilitate political gains
Majestic buildings symbolize national institutions and their high purpose. Impressive board rooms provide solumn backdrops to the decision making of corporate governors. Preserving and strengthening institutions makes life more predictable. It tends to reduce the cost and risk of individual and collective action. It assures that individuals and communities focus on shared goals and objectives, the focus necessary to survival, security, and well-being of citizen and employee alike. A "failed state" or "bankrupt company" is an institution that has lost its ability to make rules and policy and to promote cooperation; it has lost trust and no longer merits loyalty. It no longer provides the social cohesion essential to setting goals and applying power to achieve them.
Institutions require law, governance, authority, and citizenship to function. You can read more about each of these below. All are essential to maintain stability and progress toward shared objectives. A number of institutional forms for governance exist, not a single ideal. Organizations grow in environments from felt needs of their citizens, who resource them. They take on identities and wrap themselves in sacred truths.
Political institutions enlarge organizations and formulate rationales or ideologies. By creating policies to focus on goals, they reduce friction of unruliness. They sanctify some policies, processes, and procedures as laws,and they turn some persons into authorities. Each form of political institution answers in its unique way a set of basic questions: Who is in charge? By what values and goals does the one in charge operate? Who evaluates the operations? And who provides the resources to operate: the citizens To a political scientist, each successful governing institution performs a required set of functions. Knowing these questions or functions will help us keep our options open for maximum creativity and adaptation.
Covert, invisible, and competing goals will always exist. They need voicing and negotiating rather than being ignored or quashed. Smooth functioning governing institutions can reduce the friction that competing values, goals, and verities otherwise cause. They can increase the polity's effectiveness and efficiency using positive politics.
