The Practice of Institutionalizing Ideas: Institutionalizing "Popular Power" in Venezuela.

This paper makes a contribution to the research agenda on institutionalizing ideas, a subject related to but different than establishing an idea's causal power. It treats idea institutionalization as the dependent variable and argues that the practices actors use to determine an idea's meaning constitute a key element of the institutionalization puzzle. Conceiving of practices as mediums of translation and mechanisms of appropriation, the paper suggests that we need to know more about how the process of embedding an idea affects institutionalization and in turn how idea's meanings change as they get practiced. The case of "popular power" in Venezuela shows how the practices that actors used to implement an idea involuntarily changed its meaning while institutionalizing it. From this comes a lesson: analytic models of institutionalization need to be able to account for the contingencies that emerge from the process of implementing an idea in an already complicated institutional environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]