Institutionalisation is an important process which remains shrouded in mystery. Political science has experienced limited success in identifying the mechanisms conducive to institutionalisation mainly because mainstream institutionalist theories focus on Western states with structured institutions. As more countries attempt to democratise and consolidate their new institutions, this limitation becomes increasingly apparent and the need to address it more urgent. Therefore, I propose a new theory to account for institutionalisation in emerging democracies. The thesis argues that in democratising countries the memory of the past authoritarian regime and the transition‟s main crises shape elite interests in carrying out institutionalisation reforms. To substantiate the argument, I test it in case studies of military and judicial reform in Albania from 1992 to 2009. To trace the development of collective memory and its effect on political action, I investigate the coverage of three Albanian daily newspapers and the parliamentary debate of military and judicial reform. I rely on content and discourse analysis to analyse the data. The thesis concludes that Albania was more successful in institutionalising the military than the judiciary because of its elites‟ collective memory. Specifically, the memory of the communist past as a violence-based regime in conjunction with the memory of the transition‟s crises as military failures reshaped elite interests which converged on military reform paving the way for its institutionalisation. This study elucidates a complex process such as institutionalisation in an understudied country such as Albania and opens a new research programme connecting institutionalist, democratisation and transition studies.