Rethinking Rules: Creativity and Constraint in the U.S. House of Representatives

Abstract

Rules are a characteristic feature of political institutions. They govern the order and conduct of business within institutions and the distribution of power and authority among them. Rules also structure the behavior of goal-oriented actors, for example, by establishing the parameters for strategic interaction. Rules, in other words, define the scope of permissible actions. As a source of constraint, rules are a part of the regulative, normative, and cognitive structures that shape the alternatives actors confront (Clemens and Cook 1999). But rules have a double-edged quality; they do more than limit alternatives or set the parameters for strategic interaction. Rules also provide actors with creative leeway. In this way, rules are at once constraining and empowering. Consider, for example, how rules operate as a component of a game. According to the game designers Frank Lantz and Eric Zimmerman (1999), the rules of a game engender play . Whereas the rules, “the laws that determine what can and cannot happen,” may be fixed and rigid, play, the human experience of a game “set into motion by the players' choices and actions,” is creative and improvisational (Lantz and Zimmerman 1999). As they describe the process: Within the strictly demarcated confines of the rules, play emerges and ripples outwards, bubbling up through the fixed and rigid rule-structure in unexpected patterns. During play, relationships between parts becomes [ sic ] a complex system, capable of producing intricate patterns.…Uncertainty, produced by randomness or by a rich palette of strategic choice is a necessary ingredient of successful gameplay. Just try to imagine a game without the pleasurable suspense of an uncertain ending. (Lantz and Zimmerman 1999)

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