Paul Pierson

Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics

It is increasingly common for social scientists to describe political processes as “path dependent.” The concept, however, is often employed without careful elaboration. This article conceptualizes path dependence as a social process grounded in a dynamic of “increasing returns.” Reviewing recent literature in economics and suggesting extensions to the world of politics, the article demonstrates that increasing returns processes are likely to be prevalent, and that good analytical foundations exist for exploring their causes and consequences. The investigation of increasing returns can provide a more rigorous framework for developing some of the key claims of recent scholarship in historical institutionalism: Specific patterns of timing and sequence matter; a wide range of social outcomes may be possible; large consequences may result from relatively small or contingent events; particular courses of action, once introduced, can be almost impossible to reverse; and consequently, political development is punctuated by critical moments or junctures that shape the basic contours of social life.

The Path to European Integration A Historical Institutionalist Analysis

Observers of the European Community have criticized “intergovernmentalist” accounts for exaggerating the extent of member-state control over European integration. This article grounds these criticisms in a historical institutionalist analysis, stressing the need to study European integration as a process that unfolds over time. Losses of control result not only from the autonomous actions of supranational organizations, but from member-state preoccupation with short-term concerns, the ubiquity of unintended consequences, and the instability of member-state policy preferences. Once gaps in control emerge, change-resistant decision rules and sunk costs associated with societal adaptations make it difficult for member states to reassert their authority. Brief examination of the evolution of EC social policy suggests the limitations of treating the EC as an instrument facilitating collective action among sovereign states. Rather, integration should be viewed as a path-dependent process producing a fragmented but discernible multitiered European polity.

When Effect Becomes Cause: Policy Feedback and Political Change

As governmental activity has expanded, scholars have been increasingly inclined to suggest that the structure of public policies has an important influence on patterns of political change. Yet research on policy feedback is mostly anecdotal, and there has so far been little attempt to develop more general hypotheses about the conditions under which policies produce politics. Drawing on recent research, this article suggests that feedback occurs through two main mechanisms. Policies generate resources and incentives for political actors, and they provide those actors with information and cues that encourage particular interpretations of the political world. These mechanisms operate in a variety of ways, but have significant effects on government elites, interest groups, and mass publics. By investigating how policies influence different actors through these distinctive mechanisms, the article outlines a research agenda for moving from the current focus on illustrative case studies to the investigation of broader propositions about how and when policies are likely to be politically consequential.

Coping with permanent austerity : welfare state restructuring in affluent democracies

Paul Pierson : Die Umstrukturierung der Sozialversicherung der fortschrittlichen Gesellschaften in Zeiten der Budgetdisziplin. ; ; Die fortschrittlichen Industriegesellschaften sind immer grosserem Druck zur Reform ihrer Sozialversicherungssysteme ausgesetzt, obwohl die Sozialprogramme allgemein eine grosse politische Unterstutzung finden. Reformpolitiken mussen einerseits die Widerstandsfahigkeit der Sozialeinrichtungen, andererseits die permanente Ausgabendisziplin des Umfeldes berucksichtigen und richten daher allgemein ihre Bemuhungen auf die Erstellung von weitgreifenden Koalitionen aus, mit dem Zweck, den ausgereiften Wohlfahrtsstaat zwar nicht auseinanderzunehmen, sondern ihn eher umzubtrukturieren. Zum Verstandnis der Reformdynamik mussen zunachst die Dimensionen genau unterschieden werden, die der Reform zugrundeliegen und daruber hinaus die spezifibchen institutionellen und politischen Vereinbarungen berucksichtigt werden, die in jedem der Sozialschutzregime vorhanden sind, ob sie liberal, konservativ, korporativ oder sozialdemokratisch sind sondern ihn eher umzubtrukturieren. Zum Verstandnis der Reformdynamik mussen zunachst die Dimensionen genau unterschieden werden, die der Reform zugrundeliegen und daruber hinaus die spezifibchen institutionellen und politischen Vereinbarungen berucksichtigt werden, die in jedem der Sozialschutzregime vorhanden sind, ob sie liberal, konservativ, korporativ oder sozialdemokratisch sind

The Limits of Design: Explaining Institutional Origins and Change

Political scientists have paid much more attention to the effects of institutions than to issues of institutional origins and change. One result has been a marked tendency to fall back on implicit or explicit functional accounts, in which the effects of institutions explain the presence of those institutions. Institutional effects may indeed provide part of such an explanation. Yet the plausibility of functional accounts depends upon either a set of favorable conditions at the design stage or the presence of environments conducive to learning or competition. Exploring variability in the relevant social contexts makes it possible to both establish the restricted range of functional accounts and specify some promising lines of inquiry into the subject of institutional origins and change.

Not Just What, but When: Timing and Sequence in Political Processes

Many perceive the clash between those advocating rational choice theory and their critics to be the dominant cleavage in contemporary political science. At least as fundamental, if much less widely discussed, is the divide over the role of historical analysis (or the investigation of temporal processes). Most social scientists take a “snapshot” view of political life. How does the distribution of public opinion affect policy outcomes? How do individual social characteristics influence propensities to vote? How do electoral rules affect the structure of party systems? Disputes among competing theories center on which factors (“variables”) in the current environment generate important political outcomes. Variable-centered analy- ses are based, however, on some questionable assump- tions about how the social world works. For useful discussions see Andrew Abbott, “Transcending General Linear Reality,” Sociological Theory 6 (1988): 169–86; John C. Harsanyi, “Explanation and Comparative Dynamics in the Social Sciences,” Behavioral Science 5 (1960): 136–45; and Charles C. Ragin, The Comparative Method: Moving Beyond Qualitative and Quantitative Strategies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). The significance of such variables is frequently distorted when they are ripped from their temporal context. There is often a strong case to be made for shifting from snapshots to moving pictures. Placing politics in time systematically situating particular moments (including the present) in a temporal sequence of events and processes can greatly enrich our understanding of complex social dynamics.

Winner-Take-All Politics: Public Policy, Political Organization, and the Precipitous Rise of Top Incomes in the United States*

The dramatic rise in inequality in the United States over the past generation has occasioned considerable attention from economists, but strikingly little from students of American politics. This has started to change: in recent years, a small but growing body of political science research on rising inequality has challenged standard economic accounts that emphasize apolitical processes of economic change. For all the sophistication of this new scholarship, however, it too fails to provide a compelling account of the political sources and effects of rising inequality. In particular, these studies share with dominant economic accounts three weaknesses: (1) they downplay the distinctive feature of American inequality —namely, the extreme concentration of income gains at the top of the economic ladder; (2) they miss the profound role of government policy in creating this “winner-take-all” pattern; and (3) they give little attention or weight to the dramatic long-term transformation of the organizational landscape of American politics that lies behind these changes in policy. These weaknesses are interrelated, stemming ultimately from a conception of politics that emphasizes the sway (or lack thereof) of the “median voter” in electoral politics, rather than the influence of organized interests in the process of policy making. A perspective centered on organizational and policy change —one that identifies the major policy shifts that have bolstered the economic standing of those at the top and then links those shifts to concrete organizational efforts by resourceful private interests —fares much better at explaining why the American political economy has become distinctively winner-take-all.

Business Power and Social Policy: Employers and the Formation of the American Welfare State

A number of scholars have highlighted the role of employers in shaping the development of the welfare state. Yet the results of this research have often been ambiguous or disputed because of insufficient attention to theoretical, conceptual, and methodological problems in the study of political influence. This article considers three of these problems in turn: the failure to distinguish and investigate multiple mechanisms of exercising influence, the misspecification of preferences, and the inference of influence from ex post correlation between actor preferences and outcomes. We demonstrate the importance of each through a reexamination of the early development of the American welfare state. The striking feature we suggest is neither business dominance nor weakness but marked variation in influence over time and across institutional settings.

Three Worlds of Welfare State Research

This article reviews three important clusters of recent research on the comparative politics of the welfare state. The three clusters focus on political economy, gender and social policy, and the investigation of long-term developmental processes. The article argues that in each area there has been significant progress and that there are increasing opportunities for intellectual exchange across these clusters. Research in this important empirical sub field of comparative politics has been pluralistic and eclectic, both methodologically and theoretically. Overall, this stance has yielded substantial benefits.

After the “Master Theory”: Downs, Schattschneider, and the Rebirth of Policy-Focused Analysis

Drawing on the pioneering work of Anthony Downs, political scientists have tended to characterize American politics as a game among undifferentiated competitors, played out largely through elections, with outcomes reflecting how formal rules translate election results into legislative votes. In this perspective, voters, campaigns, elections, and the ideological distribution of legislators merit extensive scrutiny. Other features of the political environment— most notably, the policies these legislators help create and the interest groups that struggle over these policies—are deemed largely peripheral. However, contemporary politics often looks very different than the world described by Downs. Instead, it more closely resembles the world described by E. E. Schattschneider—a world in which policy and organized groups loom large, the role of elections and voters is highly conditional, and the key struggle is not over gaining office but over reshaping governance in enduring ways. Over the last twenty years, a growing body of scholarship has emerged that advances this corrective vision—an approach we call “policy-focused political science.” In this framework, politics is centrally about the exercise of government authority for particular substantive purposes. Such exercises of authority create the “terrain” for political struggle, profoundly shaping both individual and group political behavior. Even more important, precisely because policies can have such substantial effects, they also serve as the “prize” for many of the most enduring players in the political arena, especially organized interest groups. The payoffs of a policy-focused perspective include a more accurate portrayal of the institutional environment of modern politics, an appreciation for the fundamental importance of organized groups, a better understanding of the dynamics of policy change, and a more accurate mapping of interests, strategies, and influence. These benefits are illustrated through a brief examination of two of the biggest changes in American politics over the last generation: partisan polarization and rising economic inequality.