Kathleen Thelen

Structuring politics : historical institutionalism in comparative analysis

Preface 1. Historical institutionalism in comparative politics Kathleen Thelen and Sven Steinmo 2. Labor market institutions and working class strength Bo Rothstein 3. The rules of the game: the logic of health policy-making in France, Switzerland, and Sweden Ellen Immergut 4. The movement from Keynesianism to monetarism Peter A. Hall 5. Political structure, state policy, and industrial change: early railroad policy in the United States and Prussia Colleen A. Dunlavy 6. Institutions and political change: working class formation in England and the United States, 1820-1896 Victoria C. Hattam 7. Ideas and the politics of bounded innovation Margaret Weir 8. The establishment of work-welfare programmes in the United States and Britain: politics, ideas, and institutions Desmond S. King.

Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency and Power

En el ano 2006 Shapiro, Skowronek y Galvin editaron un libro que puso al dia el estudio de las instituciones al presentar un conjunto de traba- jos representativos de las principales tradiciones en el estudio del tema. Los editores no pidieron a los autores que abandonaran su enfoque para mimetizarse -o dialogar- con los demas; en vez de eso, les pidieron que asumieran con claridad su postura, pero presentandola de forma atractiva para aquellos colegas que pertenecian a otras dis- ciplinas o corrientes. El libro reunio importantes aportaciones de John Elster, Clauss Offe, John Ferejohn, Rogers Smith, entre otros. En aquella obra Kathleen Thelen aporto una critica a la teoria del equilibrio interrumpido, que es la forma mas comun de ver el cambio segun dos de los institucionalismos mas prominentes: el his- torico y el de la eleccion racional. Oponiendose a la idea de que las instituciones unicamente cambian en momentos breves de intensa transformacion -casi siempre producto de algun shock exogeno, para luego entrar en largos periodos de reproduc- cion e inercia-, la autora propuso que el cambio institucional muchas veces es un proceso gradual y continuo. Mediante el ana- lisis de las instituciones dedicadas al entrenamiento

A Theory of Gradual Institutional Change

Once created, institutions often change in subtle and gradual ways over time. Although less dramatic than abrupt and wholesale transformations, these slow and piecemeal changes can be equally consequential for patterning human behavior and for shaping substantive political outcomes. Consider, for example, the British House of Lords. This is an institution that began to take shape in the thirteenth century out of informal consultations between the Crown and powerful landowners. By the early nineteenth century, membership was hereditary and the chamber was fully institutionalized at the center of British politics. Who would have thought that this deeply undemocratic assembly of aristocrats would survive the transition to democracy? Not the early Labour Party, which was founded in 1900 and understandably committed to the elimination of a chamber from which its constituents were, more or less by definition, excluded.

Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies

The political-economic institutions that have traditionally reconciled economic efficiency with social solidarity in the advanced industrial countries, and specifically in the so-called ‘coordinated market economies’, are indisputably under pressure today. However, scholars disagree on the trajectory and significance of the institutional changes we can observe in many of these countries, and they generally lack the conceptual tools that would be necessary to resolve these disagreements. This article attempts to break through this theoretical impasse by providing a framework for determining the direction, identifying the mode, and assessing the meaning of the changes we can observe in levels of both economic coordination and social solidarity.

Institutionalizing Dualism: Complementarities and Change in France and Germany

The French and German political economies have been significantly reconfigured over the past two decades. Although the changes have often been more piecemeal than revolutionary, their cumulative effects are profound. The authors characterize the changes that have taken place as involving the institutionalization of new forms of dualism and argue that what gives contemporary developments a different character from the past is that dualism is now explicitly underwritten by state policy. They see this outcome as the culmination of a sequence of developments, beginning in the field of industrial relations, moving into labor market dynamics, and finally finding institutional expression in welfare state reforms. Contrary to theoretical accounts that suggest that institutional complementarities support stability and institutional reproduction, the authors argue that the linkages across these realms have helped to translate employer strategies that originated in the realm of industrial relations into a stable, new, and less egalitarian model with state support.

The State and Coordinated Capitalism: Contributions of the Public Sector to Social Solidarity in Postindustrial Societies

This article investigates the politics of change in coordinated market econo\mies, and explores why some countries (well known for their highly cooperative arrangements) manage to sustain coordination when adjusting to economic transformation, while others fail. the authors argue that the broad category of “coordinated market economies” subsumes different types of cooperative engagement: macrocorporatist forms of coordination are characterized by national-level institutions for fostering cooperation and feature a strong role for the state, while forms of coordination associated with enterprise cooperation more typically occur at the level of sector or regional institutions and are often privately controlled. although these diverse forms of coordination once appeared quite similar and functioned as structural equivalents, they now have radically different capacities for self-adjustment.The role of the state is at the heart of the divergence among european coordinated countries. a large public sector affects the political dynamics behind collective outcomes, through its impact both on the state’s construction of its own policy interests and on private actors’ goals. although a large public sector has typically been written off as an inevitable drag on the economy, it can provide state actors with a crucial political tool for shoring up coordination in a postindustrial economy. the authors use the cases of denmark and germany to illustrate how uncontroversially coordinated market economies have evolved along two sharply divergent paths in the past two decades and to reflect on broader questions of stability and change in coordinated market economies. the two countries diverge most acutely with respect to the balance of power between state and society; indeed, the danish state—far from being a constraint on adjustment (a central truism in neoliberal thought)—plays the role of facilitator in economic adjustment, policy change, and continued coordination.

Advances in Comparative-Historical Analysis

Part I. Introduction: 1. Comparative-historical analysis in contemporary political science Kathleen Thelen and James Mahoney Part II. Agenda-Setting Work: 2. The developmental state is dead: long live the developmental state! Stephan Haggard 3. Coalitions, policies, and distribution: Esping-Andersens three worlds of welfare capitalism Jane Gingrich 4. Not just what but when (and how): comparative-historical approaches to authoritarian durability Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way Part III. Tools for Temporal Analysis: 5. Power and path dependence Paul Pierson 6. Critical junctures and institutional change Giovanni Capoccia 7. Drift and conversion: hidden faces of institutional change Jacob S. Hacker, Paul Pierson and Kathleen Thelen Part IV. Issues of Method: 8. The comparative sequential method Tulia G. Falleti and James Mahoney 9. Nested analysis: towards the integration of comparative-historical analysis with other social science methods Evan S. Lieberman Epilogue: comparative-historical analysis: past, present, future Wolfgang Streeck.

Drift and Conversion: Hidden Faces of Institutional Change

Until recently, institutionally minded scholars in the social sciences generally treated institutions as fixed. Whether defined as the rules of the political game, the standard operating procedures of bureaucracies, or the regularized norms guiding organizational behavior, institutions were associated with stability and were invoked as independent or intervening variables to explain persistent cross-national differences in outcomes. More recent work in the field, however, has attempted to provide greater insight into how institutions evolve and how institutional effects can change over time. Instead of seeing institutions as largely unchanging features of the political environment, these arguments seek to specify what kinds of institutional changes propelled by what kinds of social processes are most likely under what kinds of political configurations. This chapter advances this more recent agenda, examining two important, common, and theoretically explicable processes through which institutional effects change over time, which we call “drift” and “conversion.” Drift occurs when institutions or policies are deliberately held in place while their context shifts in ways that alter their effects. A simple example is the US minimum wage, which is not indexed to inflation and thus declines in value as prices rise unless new federal legislation is enacted. Those wishing to effect change through drift need only prevent the updating of existing rules. Drift thus depends on how sensitive the effects of an institution are to its context, whether policies are designed in ways that foster updating in the face of changing circumstances, and whether it is easy or difficult to block such updating. Conversion, by contrast, occurs when political actors are able to redirect institutions or policies toward purposes beyond their original intent. An example is the ability of corporations to use the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 to hinder labor unions. Passed amid widespread concern about corporate collusion, the legislation was meant to break up business trusts that were “in restraint of trade.” Yet corporations managed to convince federal courts that union organizing was “in restraint of trade.”

Comparative-Historical Analysis in Contemporary Political Science

Comparative-historical analysis (CHA) has a long and distinguished pedigree in political science. In a discipline in which a succession of different movements has advocated new approaches promising more powerful theory or new methodologies for more rigorously testing theory, or both, CHA has stood the test of time. It remains the approach of choice for many scholars spanning all generations and continues to set agendas – both theoretical and substantive – for many other scholars who use alternative analytical and methodological tools. In this introductory chapter, we explore the resilience and continuing influence of CHA in contemporary political science. We attribute the enduring impact of CHA to strengths built into its very defining features: its focus on large-scale and often complex outcomes of enduring importance; its emphasis on empirically grounded, deep case-based research; and its attention to process and the temporal dimensions of politics. These features not only distinguish CHA but also endow the approach with comparative advantages not found in other research. The methodological churning within political science is not new, and yet it seems to have intensified over the past several years. Beginning in the late 1980s, the field underwent important changes as rational choice theory made its way into the mainstream of the discipline. Scholarship using game theory was greeted with considerable fanfare and controversy, celebrated by some for the theoretical elegance of its models, criticized by others for the limited leverage that these models often seemed to offer in explaining real world outcomes. Even if this line of work did not have the transformative effects that some predicted, clearly it now occupies an important place in the discipline. More recently, an empiricist strand of work has emerged with similar energy and force. Billed by its proponents as a “revolution in causal inference,” the experimental method has been sweeping through many departments. Todays experimentalists put great emphasis on research design, often recruiting subjects – in the lab, in the field, or online – to participate in experiments that attempt to isolate the effects of variables of concern.

Gender in the Journals: Publication Patterns in Political Science

This article explores publication patterns across 10 prominent political science journals, documenting a significant gender gap in publication rates for men and women. We present three broad findings. First , we find no evidence that the low percentage of female authors simply mirrors an overall low share of women in the profession. Instead, we find continued underrepresentation of women in many of the discipline’s top journals. Second , we find that women are not benefiting equally in a broad trend across the discipline toward coauthorship. Most published collaborative research in these journals emerges from all-male teams. Third , it appears that the methodological proclivities of the top journals do not fully reflect the kind of work that female scholars are more likely than men to publish in these journals. The underrepresentation of qualitative work in many journals is associated as well with an underrepresentation of female authors.