A Formal Characterisation of Institutionalised Power

Abstract

It is a standard feature of norm-governed institutions that designated agents are empowered to create particular kinds of states of affairs by means of the performance of specified types of actions. Frequently, the states of affairs are of a normative kind, in the sense that they pertain to rights and obligations, as for instance when a Head of Department signs a purchase agreement and thereby creates an obligation on his employer to pay for goods received. We use the term institutionalised power to stand for the notion of power we here seek to explicate. Following a lead from jurisprudential discussions of legal power, we distinguish institutionalised power from permission and practical possibility. We define a conditional connective intended to capture the consequence relation implicit in statements of the form: according to the constraints operative in institutions, the performance of some act A by agent x counts as a means of creating state of affairs B. When combined with deontic and action logics, the new connective facilitates the analysis of a number of notions crucial to the understanding of organised interaction in institutions, such as authoriso.tzon and delegation. We conclude with some illustrations of the expressive power of the new logical language.