Role of Institutions

This chapter offers a very in-depth analysis and description of the role social institutions play in relation to preserving and maintaining the ethno-class stratification system implemented during the plantation era in Guyana. The institutions which will be analysed will fall under the following five categories: religious/cultural, trade/economic, political, electoral and civil society. This analysis will be informed by the qualitative and quantitative data provided in previous sections and will be done within the analytic framework of historical institutionalism. In some way, historical institutionalism as the analytic framework used in this chapter overlaps with sociological institutionalism. While I set out to explore how political and other institutions influence the shaping of certain social cleavages in society, I attach equal importance to how those cleavages themselves influence the form and formation of political and other institutions.