Institutions are excellent at exclusion and poor at inclusion. Vast politicaltrouble hangs upon that fact. All states are administrative, and the study of
‘‘inclusion’’ and ‘‘exclusion’’ is critically about the choices that are made by persons
exercising some administrative authority or some judicial authority at a ‘‘lower’’ or
operational level. Precisely because institutions embody ‘‘settled values,’’ they must
exclude or greatly disadvantage those who wish to unsettle the status quo.
Because institutions deWne ‘‘a way of life’’ they sometimes are deeply insulated
from stimuli with which they are unfamiliar. More concretely, institutional elites
often fail to accommodate change because they cannot recognize it or when cognizant
of it cannot imagine an alternative state of aVairs than the present one from which all
of their perquisitesXow. Just instrumentally, institutions often contain so many
impediments to receiving and processing information that is either unfamiliar or
which signals events that are accorded very low probability that disaster is unavoid-
able. In the case of bureaucracies, Pearl Harbor (Wohlstetter 1962 ), 9 / 11 (US National
Commission 2004 ), and the collapse of New Orleans are decisive examples.
Institutions, in sum, have tendencies toward closure from their environment and
from new information. That is inherently part of what makes them institutions.
The institutional tendency toward closure is troubling, notably when conXict
concerns social demand. Unless issues of that type can be resolved in civil society,
they will reappear as challenges within institutions. They may be so severe that, like
social hurricanes, they simply overwhelm institutions. They may be incorporated
in institutions in some form. And sometimes institutions may have a momentary
capacity for inclusionary decision, when driven by other intense needs. Such
instances may be reXected in events in the US Congress in 1964 and 1965 when
two landmark pieces of civil rights legislation were passed after seven decades of
extraordinary resistance. But institutions also have the capacity, sometimes, for
exclusionary decisions, to get rid of some who are present (Ranki 1999 ). The
elimination of African-Americans from the political process in the Southern states
after the reconstruction period following the civil war may serve as an example.
As a matter of time and convenience, this chapter will omit some institutions
that, in principle, are worth analysis, for example, the executive and the courts.
2 Getting to Inclusion: The
Hypothesis of the Counter-attack
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Once inclusion is attained, sequential problems of institutional adaptation follow.
Interesting as these issues are, my main focus is on how groups get to inclusion. For
164 matthew holden, jr.