Ethnicity and Institutional Reform: The Dynamics of “Indigenization” in the Moldovan ASSR*

Since the early 1980s, the study of political institutions has made a remarkable come-back within political science. After a long period of concentrating on the “outputs” of the political process, many political scientists have begun to give greater attention to the formal and informal structures that circumscribe political behavior: governmental departments, ministries, standard operating procedures, social norms, duties, obligations. Especially in its more inductive, interpretive forms, contemporary institutional analysis has focused less on political outcomes and more on the political process itself—the “how” questions of politics rather than the “why” questions addressed both by highly quantitative methods and by deductive, rational choice approaches. One legacy of the behavioral revolution has been a propensity for researchers to see the elucidation of why some groups win out over others in the political process as the chief end of political science. But by examining the strategic boundaries within which action takes place, modern institutional analysis—labelled the “new institutionalism” as early as 1984—seeks to remind political scientists that, quite simply, institutions matter.