Checks and balances outside the government: an introduction to the symposium

The symposium brings together case studies that are all about reasonably successful experiments in institution building and policy making by interactions between public and private spheres. The cases deal with the provision of information enabling market to perform, law making, and the control of political discretion and public bureaus. Each in its own way, they show how agents have room for some reasoned choice, although eventually this room for choice is narrowed by the emergence of stabilized institutions that come to shape in a rather permanent way the environment within which they later operate. The common characteristic across these case studies is the non-Parliamentarian process through which process of experimentation, rationalization and institutionalization takes place.