Critical Junctures

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giovanni Capoccia
Keyword(s):  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Institutional Development ◽  
Coalition Building ◽  
Institutional Formation ◽  
Critical Junctures ◽  
Comparative Historical Analysis ◽  
Path Dependent ◽  
Long Term Impact ◽  
Analytical Tools

In the analysis of path-dependent institutions, the concept of critical juncture refers to situations of uncertainty in which decisions of important actors are causally decisive for the selection of one path of institutional development over other possible paths. The chapter parses the potentialities and the limitations of the concept in comparative-historical analysis, and proposes analytical tools for the comparative analysis of the smaller-scale and temporally proximate causes that shape decision-making on institutional innovation during critical junctures. In particular, the chapter discusses several patterns of short-term politics of institutional formation --innovative coalition-building for reform; “out-of-winset” outcomes; ideational battles; and near-missed institutional change—that can have a long-term impact on the development of policies and institutions.

Regionalism in New Democracies: The Authoritarian Origins of Voter–Party Linkages

2019 ◽  
Vol 73 (4) ◽  
pp. 908-922
Author(s):  
Chantal E. Berman ◽  
Elizabeth R. Nugent
Keyword(s):  
Historical Analysis ◽  
State Building ◽  
Vote Choice ◽  
Political Transformation ◽  
Legislative Elections ◽  
Regional Heterogeneity ◽  
Authoritarian State ◽  
Exit Survey ◽  
Path Dependent

We investigate the path-dependent effects of subnational variation in authoritarian state-building policies on voter–party linkages after regime change. We argue that long-term patterns of regional favoritism and marginalization produce patterned regional heterogeneity in the attitudes and preferences linking voters with parties. Postcolonial state-building policies create “winners” and “losers” from particular interventions, in turn shaping local citizens’ preferences over these policy areas and forming axes of contestation ready to be activated by democratic politics. We argue that attitudes associated with regionally consistent state-building policies should function uniformly as determinants of vote choice across regions, while attitudes associated with regionally divergent state-building policies should experience patterned regional variation in their effect on vote choice. We develop these arguments empirically with historical analysis of Tunisian state-building and an original exit survey of voters in five diverse regions conducted on the day of Tunisia’s first democratic legislative elections in 2014. Our findings contribute to a growing literature on the importance of analyzing political transformation at the subnational level.

Marketing System Failure: Revisioning Layton’s Marketing System Model

2020 ◽  
pp. 027614672096145
Author(s):  
Janine Williams ◽  
Janet Davey ◽  
Micael-Lee Johnstone
Keyword(s):  
System Failure ◽  
Marketing System ◽  
System Failures ◽  
Systems Perspective ◽  
Self Organized ◽  
Critical Junctures ◽  
Marketing Systems ◽  
Conceptual Paper ◽  
Path Dependent

The purpose of this conceptual paper is to examine the mechanisms of long term marketing system failure from a path dependent, marketing systems perspective in order to identify ways of avoiding such situations in future. Using the model of Layton and Duffy (2018) we critically analyze the current plastic packaging crisis and its evolution over time. Through examining the mechanisms of failure from a systems perspective, we extend the path dependent, marketing system evolution model and advance understanding of marketing system failures. As a result of this analysis, the paper provides five propositions regarding where failure occurs within the system and identifies critical junctures where intervention (self-organized stakeholder initiatives and/or public policy intervention) can facilitate desirable outcomes in the future.

Chronic Instability and the Limits of Path Dependence

2015 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 976-991 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Bernhard
Keyword(s):  
Federal Republic ◽  
Path Dependence ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Historical Institutionalism ◽  
External Shocks ◽  
Chronic Instability ◽  
Rapid Succession ◽  
Critical Junctures ◽  
Comparative Historical Analysis ◽  
Lock In

Historical institutionalism challenged older forms of comparative historical analysis by moving away from purely structural explanations of historical outcomes. Instead it posited that there were critical junctures in which actors chose between institutional alternatives, which in turn led to path dependence. I examine a phenomenon neglected both by historical institutionalism and older forms of historical analysis—chronic instability. Instead of institutional lock-in, some junctures lead to periods of instability in which a series of regimes replace each other in rapid succession. Three different causal mechanisms that routinely contribute to chronic instability—external shocks, changing configurations of actors, and disjuncture between the logic of change and mechanisms of reproduction—are explored in depth. The plausibility of the theory is illustrated by an examination of regime instability in Germany from the collapse of the Empire in 1918 through the founding of the Federal Republic in 1949.

Welfare Policy Expansion in Botswana and Mauritius

2012 ◽  
Vol 45 (12) ◽  
pp. 1483-1509 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marianne S. Ulriksen
Keyword(s):  
Developing Countries ◽  
Policy Development ◽  
Welfare Policy ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Welfare Regime ◽  
Economic Policies ◽  
Welfare Regimes ◽  
Welfare Policies ◽  
Comparative Historical Analysis ◽  
Path Dependent

How come two developing countries with similar economic, institutional, and democratic attributes have developed vastly different welfare regimes? Drawing inspiration from the welfare regime literature, the author subjects Botswana and Mauritius to a comparative historical analysis that explores the economic and political trajectories of their welfare policy development. The findings offer both support and modifications to the established and mostly Western-oriented literature. First, politics affect welfare policy development. In developing countries, the rural population can promote welfare policy expansion, but it is middle-class interests that shape the direction of policy development. Second, given the importance of politics, conceptualizations of welfare policies need to include both the spending and the financing side. Finally, the causes of different welfare regime paths need to be examined with attention to the particular economic contexts of developing countries and how welfare and economic policies are interrelated and to some extent path dependent.

Racism Is Not Enough: Minority Coalition Building in San Francisco, Seattle, and Vancouver

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-215 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jae Yeon Kim
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Coalition Building ◽  
Exogenous Shocks ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

Scholars have long argued that the marginalized racial status shared by ethnic minority groups is a strong incentive for mobilization and coalition building in the United States. However, despite their members’ shared racial status as “Orientals,” different types of housing coalitions were formed in the Chinatowns of San Francisco, Seattle, and Vancouver during the 1960s and 1970s. Asian race-based coalitions appeared in San Francisco and Seattle, but not in Vancouver, where a cross-racial coalition was built between the Chinese and southern and eastern Europeans. Drawing on exogenous shocks and process tracing, this article explains how historical legacies—specifically, the political geography of settlement—shaped this divergence. These findings demonstrate how long-term historical analysis offers new insights into the study of minority coalition formation in the United States.

scholarly journals Economic Growth in the Lower Yangzi Region of China in 1911–1937: A Quantitative and Historical Analysis

2008 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 355-392 ◽  
Author(s):  
DEBIN MA
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Structural Change ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Per Capita ◽  
Yangzi Region ◽  
City State ◽  
Long Term Impact

Through a detailed reconstruction of 1933 GDP for the two provinces in China's most advanced region, the Lower Yangzi, I show that their per capita income was 55 percent higher than China's average, and they had experienced a growth and structural change between 1914–1918 and 1931–1936 comparable to contemporaneous Japan and her East Asian colonies. This article highlights the unique political institution of early-twentieth-century Shanghai as a city state, with its rule of law and secure property rights laying the foundation for economic growth in the Lower Yangzi with long-term impact throughout East Asia.

Legacies and Memories in Movements

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donatella della Porta ◽  
Massimiliano Andretta ◽  
Tiago Fernandes ◽  
Eduardo Romanos ◽  
Markos Vogiatzoglou
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Theoretical Point ◽  
Long Term Effects ◽  
Democratic Transitions ◽  
Critical Junctures ◽  
Transitions To Democracy ◽  
Long Term Impact ◽  
The Impact

This volume addresses long-term effects of democratic transitions on social movements in Italy, Greece, Portugal, and Spain. From the theoretical point of view, the main focus of reflection is on the long-term impact of eventful moments on social movements, especially the causal mechanisms through which legacies and memories of transformative protest events are produced and reproduced over time, enhancing and constraining contemporary movements’ repertoires and frames. The paths of democratic transitions set norms and institutions that affect protests in the long term. Without taking a deterministic view, we examine the ways in which the past is revisited and read anew how stories are selected, what is resilient, and what is transformed. While research on social movements started in Europe with historical work on labor movements, the impact of historical legacies and memories on social movements has not been much theorized. More in general, while there is a growing interest in memory, there is little systematic theory or comparative research on ways in which important events have long-lasting institutional consequences and are remembered by future generations. With this volume, we address this gap by reflecting on the ways in which critical junctures, especially the ones produced through mobilization from below, affect the social movements that follow. In particular, we analyze transitions to democracy as points of departure and look at the ways in which their paths—and especially social movements’ participation in them—play a role in enhancing and constraining the movements that follow.

Adapting Coercion: How Three Industrialized Nations Manufacture Vaccination Compliance

2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (6) ◽  
pp. 823-854
Author(s):  
Charles Allan McCoy
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Wicked Problem ◽  
Foreseeable Future ◽  
Vaccination Policy ◽  
Industrialized Nations ◽  
Comparative Historical Analysis ◽  
Path Dependent

Abstract Context: This research examines the development of vaccination policy in Britain, the United States, and Australia to begin to understand the different forms of coercion that industrialized states utilize to achieve vaccination compliance from the majority of their citizens. Methods: This research applies a comparative-historical analysis of the three countries listed, using a combination of primary and secondary documents. Findings: The different degrees of compulsion in the vaccination policies of Britain, the United States, and Australia is explained through an analysis of the path-dependent ways that each nation adapted coercion in response to civil society resistance. Each nation has moved up and down a continuum of coercion searching for a policy that balances overcoming passive noncompliance without engendering active resistance. Arriving at different balancing points between these two objectives, the three nations have now institutionalized policies with different degrees of coercion. Conclusions: This research shows that vaccination policy is not just created top-down by the state, but through an ongoing interactive process with citizens and civil society. Furthermore, as vaccination is a “wicked problem” that faces ongoing civil society resistance, states will need to perpetually adapt the coerciveness of their policies into the foreseeable future.

The Indigenous Inheritance: Critical Antecedents and State Building in Latin America and Southeast Asia

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-274
Author(s):  
Dan Slater ◽  
Hillel David Soifer
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Ethnic Diversity ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
State Building ◽  
Critical Junctures ◽  
Path Dependent ◽  
State Infrastructural Power ◽  
Infrastructural Power

AbstractIn comparative-historical analysis, countries are always different places before critical junctures set them on divergent pathways. By comparing the legacies of politicized ethnic diversity for the construction of state infrastructural power in Latin America and Southeast Asia, we elaborate the methodological and substantive importance of these “critical antecedents.” The critical antecedent in each region was the inheritance at independence of a sharp indigenous cleavage. This indigenous inheritance shaped threat perceptions and state-society coalitions in both regions in similarly powerful path-dependent ways—yet in intriguingly divergent directions. A salient indigenous cleavage hindered but did not preclude state building in nineteenth-century Peru, while fostering but not predestining state building in post–World War II Malaysia. Divergent levels of postcolonial state infrastructural power thus exhibit deep if indirect foundations in the identity cleavages inherited from preindependence eras. This cross-region comparative exploration highlights the analytical leverage gained from systematically incorporating preexisting cross-case differences into critical juncture accounts.

Crisis Phones - Suicide Prevention Versus Suggestion/Contagion Effects

Crisis ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 220-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Stack
Keyword(s):  
Suicide Prevention ◽  
Contagion Effects ◽  
Long Term Impact

Abstract. Background: There has been no systematic work on the short- or long-term impact of the installation of crisis phones on suicides from bridges. The present study addresses this issue. Method: Data refer to 219 suicides from 1954 through 2013 on the Skyway Bridge in St. Petersburg, Florida. Six crisis phones with signs were installed in July 1999. Results: In the first decade after installation, the phones were used by 27 suicidal persons and credited with preventing 26 or 2.6 suicides a year. However, the net suicide count increased from 48 in the 13 years before installation of phones to 106 the following 13 years or by 4.5 additional suicides/year (t =3.512, p < .001). Conclusion: Although the phones prevented some suicides, there was a net increase after installation. The findings are interpreted with reference to suggestion/contagion effects including the emergence of a controversial bridge suicide blog.

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