We know far more about how institutions persist than about how they originate. Anthropology and political philosophy stress that institutions combine a functional role with a symbolic (meaning-making) dimension, yet we lack tractable economic models linking social meaning to institutionalization. In this workshop, I develop a model of moral agency in the public sphere: citizens endorse norms when public reasons establish both their merit (why desirable) and feasibility (how implementable). The framework predicts gradual change versus tipping-point regime shifts and delivers welfare implications and testable predictions, which I take to the Swiss setting by exploiting cantonal variation in democratic institutions and culture.