THREE THOUGHTS: On Yglesias on institutions:
1. It seems awfully odd to discount what is essentially the only case which would prove that your theory, and only your theory, is correct. What Yglesias seems to leave is a mishmash of possible explanations for what's actually doing the work when an institution does what it does.
2. I don't think it's a point of realism that actors never change their preferences, so that certainly can't be taken as evidence that institutions have an effect.
3. There's still a bit of cognitive dissonance here: it's not clear that what's doing the constraining in any given liberal institutionalist test case is the institution, and not the combined might of whatever states are pushing the institution to demand a certain behavior from another state. You'd have to get some case where the bureaucratic apparatus of an institution makes a demand of a state where all other states are against it or neutral, if one wished to have an explanation of institutional efficacy which couldn't be reduced to the power of particular states.
"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."
-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis
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