Cultural environment, values, and well-being – a clustering analysis
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If one looks at law this way, as a view of the way things are, like, say, science or religion or ideology or art – together, in this case, with a set of practical attitudes toward the management of controversy such a view seems to entail to those wedded to it – then the whole fact/law problem appears in an altered light. The dialectic that seemed to be between brute fact and considered judgment, between what is so and what is right, turns out to be between, as I put it earlier, a language, however vague and unintegral, of general coherence and one, however opportunistic and unmethodical, of specific consequence (p. 184).
Such a perspective implies that law, or formal institutions, serves as a source of meaning for individuals, shaping the way they interpret facts, and their normative attributions, accordingly. In defence of this argument, Mautner (2011) describes the process of legal system transformation in the United States, when abandoning legal formalism in favour of the legal realism, facilitated the adoption of the “constitutive” rather than “instrumental” view on the legal system. In other words, a formal institutional environment might serve as a trigger for cultural change and transformation. In contrast, North’s (1990) view rooted in the orthodox economic framework suggests that “informal constraints that are culturally derived will not change immediately in reaction to changes in the formal rules” (p. 45). Formal institutions can be exogenously changed, while informal institutions are shaped by cultural inheritance. This point of view suggests that adopting a new set of formal institutions might not lead to the desired policy outcome due to informal constraints. As discussed earlier, such a view, although hypothetically implying the process of social norms evolution, is unable to explain or conceptualize it. Becker et al. (2015) use the historical evidence, juxtaposing the quality of governance in the Habsburg Empire to other Eastern European countries under different regimes (Ottoman and Russian Empire). The authors assert that supremacy of the formal institutional environment in the territories subordinate to the Habsburg Empire facilitated the development of trust towards government up to modern days since former Habsburg territories feature a significantly higher degree of trust towards government even nowadays.
2.1.4. Institutional and cultural determinants of economic development Sen (1999), being one of the pioneering theorists of economic development, views it as a process of expanding and enriching human freedom. Although the common proxies for economic development such as national output per capita, the degree of industrialization, or technological advance are essential indicators
