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Levels of Expressiveness
The IG 2.0 provides the opportunity to encode institutional statements at three levels of expressiveness: IG Core, IG Extended, and IG Logico. Each level of expressiveness provides a different level of conceptual richness and focus that corresponds to distinct levels of representational detail and complexity, and to different analytical objectives. Each successive level of IG-coding expressiveness captures progressively more detail about an institutional setting.
Whereas IG Core affords an accessible baseline encoding of institutional statements for a coarse-grained capturing of institutional features with minimal training, IG Extended focuses on the extraction of deeper structural features of institutional statements (specifically, nested components). IG Logico provides a semantic overlay that can be applied at the institutional statement level and/or at the IG component level of institutional statements coded at any level of expressiveness. IG Logico’s central purpose is to i) afford a systematic annotation of components or statements with respect to their function in the institutional configuration, and ii) to serve as a vehicle to introduce theoretical concepts outside the IG (e.g., concepts from applied analytical frameworks) into the coding (theory embedding). The three levels are intended to be backward compatible, which means institutional statements coded at, e.g., the Extended level of expressiveness can also be analyzed at the Core level.
Table S2 illustrates the different coding and analytical perspectives of each level of expressiveness. The arrows highlight how the IG Logico’s semantic overlay can be applied to inform coding at the IG Extended and IG Core levels of expressiveness. Depending on the analytical objectives of a research project, it is also possible to mix and match levels of expressiveness and, for example, code individual statements at the IG Core level but apply IG Extended coding selectively on components (e.g., to capture the systemic features of execution constraints) in a particular institutional setting, like monitoring and enforcement. Table S2 illustrates this versatility schematically, which is followed by a coding example.
Table S2: Table outlining the progressive collection of greater institutional structure, meaning, and relationships afforded by the IG 2.0’s levels of expressiveness.
To showcase the versatility of the IG’s Levels of Expressiveness, below is an example of a regulative institutional statement showing how each level of expressiveness adds more institutional detail to the coded statement. While the examples are presented as successive steps to enhance understanding, IG coding generally follows the level of expressiveness necessary to answer the research question/measure the concept(s) of interest.
In the example below, Step 0 provides the original (fictitious) formal regulative institutional statement. Step 1[IPI9.1][UB9.2] represents the encoding of the institutional statement at the IG Core level and provides a structural parsing of the IG syntax components contained in that statement. The Attribute descriptor (A,p) in Step 1 includes information that can be further parsed into an activation condition (Cac), as will be reflected in Step 2.
Step 2 provides a deeper parsing of the institutional statement coded at the IG Core level in Step 1. By coding the institutional information contained in the Attribute (A) and its descriptor (A,p) at the Extended level of expressiveness, we are able to uncover a specific activation condition that provides program managers with permission to take further action. Specifically, if program managers believe that a certified farming operation has violated the Organic Farming Act, they are permitted to pursue revocation proceedings. Depending on your research question, such institutional linkage between an activation condition (Cac) and enforcement authority may be of value.
Steps 3a and 3b further demonstrate the versatility of IG Logico which can provide additional semantic meaning to the institutional statement regardless of the level of expressiveness it is coded at. In the offered example, the institutional statement coded at the Core and Extended level is [c10.1]annotated at the statement level as an enforcement mechanism (statement=enforcement), and at the component level the Deontic “may” is assigned a stringency value of “permitted”. These annotations facilitate subsequent analyses designed to determine the institutional structure and meaning (e.g., stringency) of enforcement mechanisms within this particular institutional context.
