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Historical Institutionalism and International Relations: Explaining Institutional Development in World Politics

June 2016

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198779629.003.0001

In book: Historical Institutionalism and International Relations (pp.3-34)

Authors:

Thomas Rixen

Freie Universität Berlin

Lora Anne Viola

Freie Universität Berlin

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Historical Institutionalism

and International Relations

Towards Explaining Change and Stability

in International Institutions

Thomas Rixen and Lora Anne Viola

Why do some international institutions, such as the United Nations Security

Council, display remarkable stability even when confronted with a changing

environment (such as changes in the distribution of power or growing

demands for membership expansion), while others, such as the G8, adapt to

systemic changes by expanding membership and authority? Why do some

institutions, such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT),

persist for decades and then rapidly undergo substantial transformation, as

with the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO), while other

institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), undergo slow

and incremental changes over a long period?

The international institutional environment has been undergoing signiﬁ-

cant change over the past two decades, even as many of the institutions created

under the particular circumstances at the end of World War II persist and

resist fundamental transformation. Change and stability often coincide, some-

times even within the same organization. The twofold empirical observation

that the international institutional order has proven highly resilient in the face

of exogenous shocks, including the end of the Cold War and the recent

economic crisis, but that individual institutions are nevertheless undergoing

signiﬁcant changes, has ushered in a new phase in the study of international

institutions. This new generation of scholarship on international institutions

rejects a simple dichotomy between institutional stability and change and

grapples, instead, with explaining patterns of change and continuity; it is

concerned with questions of “institutional development”(Pierson 2004:

133–66).

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This book addresses the challenge of explaining both stability and change in

international institutions. Our purpose is to argue that historical institution-

alism (HI), developed and applied in comparative politics and public policy

but relatively neglected within international relations (IR), provides useful

tools for thinking about change in the context of stable components. As

Fioretos notes, HI “has long looked beyond political development as a dichot-

omous variable (stasis vs. fundamental change) and examines the conditions

under which variations in incremental patterns of reform create complex

conﬁgurations that reproduce the basic structure of political authority while

simultaneously entailing a novel institutional reality”(Fioretos 2011: 389; see

also Streeck and Thelen 2005; Mahoney and Thelen 2010). Given the ﬁeld’s

growing interest in explaining complex patterns of change and continuity

within international institutions, we argue that IR needs to turn to HI because

it offers a set of analytical resources and substantive insights for studying the

dynamics of institutional development.

Institutionalist research in IR has thus far taken place largely under the

leadership of rational choice institutionalism (RI) and, increasingly, sociologic-

al institutionalism (SI), reﬂecting to some extent the ﬁeld’s division into rival

liberal institutionalist and constructivist paradigms. The third paradigm of IR,

realism, has generally been skeptical of the importance of institutions. Each of

these existing approaches to institutions within IR has contributed to the ﬁeld

in numerous ways, but none of them has a well-developed approach to the dual

empirical puzzle of institutional resilience and transformation. We argue that

IR can beneﬁt from turning to the third “new institutionalism”(Hall and

Taylor 1996), HI, because it offers promising insights in three areas.

First, HI is speciﬁcally focused on the dynamics of institutional develop-

ment and has theorized the role of history or, more precisely, temporality in

that development. It pays attention to when and how historical processes

shape institutional outcomes; it gives us tools to assess the legacies of founding

moments, the consequences of new ideas and big events, the prevalence of

incremental reform over one-off design, and the unintentional aspects of

institutional formation and change. Second, by theorizing sunk costs, creation

of constituent interests, and positive feedback mechanisms, it allows for a

better conceptualization of endogenous change (and its interaction with

exogenous change). In this way, HI promises to further our understanding

of piecemeal or patchwork institutional development and the accretion of

institutional complexes. Third, HI’s origin in domestic politics makes it well-

placed to provide a fresh perspective on the interaction of domestic and

international politics. Indeed, a growing interest in the interaction of the

domestic and international levels has recently provided an important point

of entry for HI into IR (Farrell and Newman 2010, 2014).

We do not suggest, however, that IR import HI blindly. Instead, we aim to

demonstrate the theoretical and empirical value both of adopting and adapting

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4Thomas Rixen and Lora Anne Viola

the concepts and mechanisms of HI to IR. HI has largely been developed on

the basis of inductive insights and does not represent a deductively complete

theory. At times woolly and vague, we are not the ﬁrst to argue that HI would

beneﬁtfromtheoreticalreﬁnement (Pierson 2004: 139–42), and we believe that

IR can contribute to HI theory building. One of the major ambiguities in the

ﬁeld, even among historical institutionalists, concerns exactly what constitutes

“change”or “stability”(e.g. Thelen 2003; Boas 2007). A clear conceptualization

of what change means and how it differs from stability should be central to

the endeavor of more precisely explaining the interaction between change and

stability. Later in this chapter we ﬁll this gap by introducing a systematic

conceptualization of what we mean by the terms “change”and “stability,”

which serves as a guiding baseline for the subsequent empirical chapters.

In our endeavor to introduce HI to IR we join a growing group of scholars

engaged in a similar effort. Fioretos (2011), for example, was among the ﬁrst to

point out the ways in which neglecting HI comes with signiﬁcant opportunity

costs for IR. Recent contributions edited by Farrell and Newman (2010) and

Moschella and Tsingou (2013) have demonstrated that HI can successfully be

applied to the international political economy. Our effort is the ﬁrst book to

examine a broad spectrum of institutions of interest to IR from the perspective

of HI, covering policy areas such as security, economic cooperation, human

rights, and health. All of the chapters shed light on how the tools of HI, in

combination with a ﬁner conceptualization of change and stability, can help to

explain why institutions evolve at different speeds and to different extents,

thus improving our understanding of persistence and change. Indeed, all the

chapters in this volume demonstrate the usefulness of applying HI to puzzles

of interest to the ﬁeld of IR, while also evaluating and improving upon existing

concepts within HI.

The present chapter serves both to introduce HI to IR and to set the stage

for the following empirical chapters. In section 1.1 we show that the study of

institutions within IR has been slowly and implicitly turning towards the kinds

of questions and concerns that HI is well suited to address, and we introduce

HI’s basic tenets and its comparative advantages relative to other institution-

alisms. In section 1.2, we then discuss how speciﬁc HI concepts and mechan-

isms, such as path dependence, sequencing, unintended consequences, and

critical junctures, can help IR scholars better understand the dynamics of

stability and change in international institutions. But before we can apply the

theoretical tools of HI to empirical cases, we need to establish clarity on what we

mean by “institutional development,”“stability,”and “change.”Accordingly, in

section 1.3 we offer a systematic conceptualization of these terms, which will

inform the subsequent empirical chapters. In section 1.4 we provide an over-

view of the book and introduce the individual chapters. Finally, we conclude by

reﬂecting on what status HI should have within the existing ﬁeld of institution-

alist IR theories. In particular, we discuss how HI relates to the established

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Historical Institutionalism and International Relations 5

schools of rationalism and constructivism and whether it should be considered

its own paradigm. While we cannot settle this debate here, the conclusion to

this volume picks up on it again in light of the chapter contributions.

1.1. THE PROMISE OF HISTORICAL INSTITUTIONALISM

FOR INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Institutionalist research in IR has largely taken place within the context of the

broader paradigmatic debates that have structured the ﬁeld. Initial institution-

alist scholarship was shaped by the debate between realists and liberals on the

importance of institutions, accompanied by liberal institutionalists’turn to

rational choice institutionalism, which was followed by a constructivist cri-

tique of the rational approach to institutions based, in part, on insights from

sociological institutionalism. HI, located clearly outside of IR’s paradigmatic

debates, has been given relatively little explicit attention within IR. We argue,

however, that scholarship on international institutions is increasingly con-

cerned with issues that HI was developed to address. In this section, we trace

the development of institutionalism in IR from the debate on whether insti-

tutions matter, to a focus on institutional stability, to a more recent concern

with institutional change and development. Some of the central concerns of

HI—for example, how historical legacies condition available options and the

persistence of institutions despite a change in initial conditions—have been

implicitly present in the IR institutional literature for a long time (e.g. Krasner

1984; Keohane 1984; Katzenstein 1985). Other HI concerns, especially the

focus on incremental institutional change within largely stable institutions,

have become newly prominent in IR. This overlap of interests is a compelling

reason for IR to explicitly engage with HI.

Contemporary institutionalist scholarship in IR can be traced back to the

“international regimes”literature of the 1980s and 1990s (e.g. Krasner 1982;

Stein 1982), when IR shifted away from the ideographic study of organizations

to the study of how institutions, as modes of governance, are created and

maintained. Early IR discussions about institutions turned, initially, on the

debate between (neo-)realists and (neo-)liberal institutionalists about whether

institutions “matter”at all and which ones might matter (Mearsheimer 1994;

Keohane and Martin 1995; Martin and Simmons 1998). Realism, having risen

to prominence during the Cold War, focused attention on the distribution of

state power and argued that institutions were epiphenomenal to the role of

power and interests (e.g. Mearsheimer 1994). In this view, patterns of institu-

tional change and stability will be explained exogenously by changes in the

distribution of power. Some recent studies pick up (and modify) this line of

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6Thomas Rixen and Lora Anne Viola

argumentation by showing how powerful actors can use their inﬂuence to

circumvent formal institutional rules (Stone 2011), or to show how the

convergence or divergence of great power preferences is a crucial factor for

determining international regulatory outcomes (Drezner 2007).

Early liberal institutionalists, motivated in part by empirically relevant cases

of cooperation in the 1980s and especially after the end of the Cold War in the

1990s, adopted realist assumptions about actors and structure but drew on

political economy and rational choice approaches to explain cases of cooper-

ation. In this view, institutions are instrumentally designed by agents to solve

collective action problems, lower transaction costs, and generally facilitate

state cooperation for mutual gain (e.g. Snidal 1985; Oye 1985; Axelrod and

Keohane 1985). The rationalist literature argues that institutions have effects

because their rules have long-term consequences that go beyond the intentions

of their creators (Keohane 1984) and that the institutional context creates a

legacy that may shape action in ways not initially intended (Goldstein 1989).

Institutional stability thus became central to explaining both the attractiveness

and effectiveness of institutions. At the same time, RI conceives of actors as

free to deviate from an institution or to create a new one when the existing

institution no longer maximizes their utility. RI expects that when exogenous

shocks (such as the end of the Cold War) change incentives for actors to (not)

adhere to institutional equilibria, rapid institutional adaptation will occur.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a large body of literature sought to

understand why institutions created under particular circumstances at the

end of World War II persisted despite the shock of the end of the Cold War.

This resulted in a focus on endogenous institutional dynamics. Constructiv-

ism, drawing inspiration from SI, emerged to argue that institutions persist

because they embody norms and rules that actors accept as legitimate and

appropriate (March and Olsen 1998; Finnemore and Sikkink 1998). Focusing

on socialization, internalization, and routinization, SI expects institutions to

be largely stable and to exhibit isomorphism over time (DiMaggio and Powell

1991). Constructivists drew on a key insight from HI—namely, that “history

matters”—to point out that interactions and practices over time create struc-

tures and logics of action that tend to get reproduced (Wendt 1995: 77).

At the same time, other IR scholars began to assess institutional continuity

by incorporating insights from HI without always explicitly labeling it as HI.

They showed how sunk costs and increasing returns associated with institu-

tional designs constrain actors from engaging in radical reform, and how

positive feedback loops and increasing returns help to create constituencies

who favor continuation of an institution. Ikenberry, for example, draws on HI

to highlight how in the aftermath of war institutional structures inﬂuence

the distribution of power across political actors “providing advantages and

resources to some and constraining the options of others”(Ikenberry 2001: 16).

Barton et al. show how trade liberalization helped to create constituencies that

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Historical Institutionalism and International Relations 7

gained from multilateral cooperation on trade, thus reinforcing multilateral

trade institutions such as the GATT and WTO (Barton et al. 2006: 3). While

the turn to HI remained largely implicit in IR proper, students of the

EU employed HI more self-consciously. Many EU scholars argued that the

form and development of European integration could be better understood

with HI than with the traditional rational and neorealist toolkit of intergo-

vernmentalists (Pierson 1998; see also Sandholtz and Stone Sweet 1998).

Overall, the literature’s move towards endogenizing institutions helped to

explain the persistence of institutions and regimes despite the shock of the

end of the Cold War; however, it simultaneously reinforced the ﬁeld’s em-

phasis on institutional stability and thus contributed to a neglect of questions

of institutional change.

While an emphasis on stability may have seemed appropriate in the period

immediately after the end of the Cold War—especially since the collapse of the

post-World War II order expected by some (e.g. Mearsheimer 1990) did not

materialize—today a continued emphasis on stability appears misplaced.

Although not fundamentally transformed, the international institutional

environment has been undergoing signiﬁcant change over the past two dec-

ades. Existing international institutions once paralyzed by Cold War rivalries

began to adapt to a new, active role in global governance, expanded their

mandates, and opened up to new actors (e.g. Tallberg et al. 2013; Abbott et al.

2014). Meanwhile, new governance institutions have begun to emerge which

look fundamentally different from the intergovernmental organizations that

traditionally populate the international system (e.g. Zürn 2004). Some of the

new governance mechanisms are supranational, such as the WTO Dispute

Settlement Mechanism. Other institutions are transgovernmental and involve

cooperation among national-level regulators or independent bureaucrats, such

as the Basel Committee of Banking Supervisors (BCBS). Still others are

transnational, either the result of collaboration between private and public

actors like the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI), or

among private actors like the International Accounting Standards Board

(IASB). So while the initial observation—that the international institutional

order remained remarkably resilient after the end of the Cold War—still holds,

we also observe, within that order, signiﬁcant changes.

The next generation of institutional research, then, revolves around explaining

both institutional stability and change. How can we explain what we empirically

observe as a high level of institutional continuity combined with a signiﬁcant

degree of institutional change? Why and under what circumstances do some

institutions persist along some dimensions but change on others? In what ways

do continuity and change interact within an institution? What explains variation

in the depth and scope of institutional change? Why do some institutions

experience radical reform while others undergo incremental adjustment? Are

change and stability the result of exogenous shocks or endogenous processes?

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8Thomas Rixen and Lora Anne Viola

Existing RI and SI frameworks have difﬁculty in tackling these questions of

institutional development. RI hypothesizes institutional change as occurring

when existing institutional equilibria no longer provide beneﬁts to their

members. As a result, RI tends to de-emphasize endogenous causal effects of

institutions on actor preferences or choices (Milner 1998). Thompson and

Verdier (2014), for example, explain the variation between multilateral, bilateral,

and mixed regimes based on states’transaction costs of negotiating and joining

an institution, and the compliance costs and beneﬁts of membership. As they

concede, however, this “snap-shot”view misses the logic of institutional devel-

opment, which underscores the importance of prior institutional choices in

shaping institutional outcomes at any given moment (Thompson and Verdier

2014: 25).

SI, in turn, emphasizes the embeddedness of institutions in broad contexts

of social meaning, and the role of institutions in shaping preferences and

identity. In this view, institutions are not adhered to primarily because of

instrumental reasons, but rather because they are seen to be “appropriate.”

Institutions tend to be stable and change only slowly over time because

change relies on a shift in underlying ideas, norms, or culture (see e.g. Klotz

1995). Weaver (2008), for example, shows how organizational culture at the

World Bank impeded the international organization from undertaking

reforms even when its legitimacy and effectiveness were threatened. Other

recent contributions have begun to explore how deeply internalized norms,

such as the commitment to human rights, may either diffuse or erode over

time (e.g. Finnemore and Sikkink 1998; Panke and Petersohn 2012; Risse et al.

1999). Because of their emphasis on ideational and normative constraints,

however, SI studies tend to de-emphasize the material interests and power

resources of agents as well as the role of choice in the historical development

of institutions.

While RI and SI can both generate hypotheses about change, they are each

limited by their particular ontological commitments. HI stands out because

it has developed analytical tools directly addressed at understanding institu-

tional dynamics and for thinking about change in the context of stable

components.

1.2. HISTORICAL INSTITUTIONALISM AND

INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT

In this section, we ﬁrst introduce the basic tenets of HI and then turn to

discuss speciﬁc HI mechanisms and how they can illuminate questions of

institutional development in IR.

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Historical Institutionalism and International Relations 9

1.2.1. What is Historical Institutionalism?

The central characteristic that distinguishes historical institutionalism from

other institutionalisms is its conviction that understanding an institution

requires an analysis of an institution’s origins and development over time.

It is in this sense that HI is historical. A central contribution of HI has been

to redeﬁne “the disciplinary object from one directed at the study of stationary

outcomes to one focused on explaining diverse and dynamic processes of

institutional development”(Fioretos 2011: 371; see also Mahoney and Thelen

2010; Streeck and Thelen 2005; Sanders 2006; Büthe 2002). Although HI is

probably most closely associated with a concern for institutional stability or

resilience to change (see Michael Zürn, Chapter 8)—indeed, HI provides

compelling accounts of why institutions often exhibit surprising resilience,

even in the presence of changed circumstances or apparent inefﬁciency

(Pierson 2004: 17–53; Mahoney 2000)—it is crucial to notice that this atten-

tion to institutional stickiness belies a deeper concern with institutional

development. The motivating concern is to understand the processes by

which institutions change or do not change, rather than to focus on compara-

tive statics that compare an institution in time t

and time t

. By analyzing

institutions through a temporal lens, HI is able to address questions of

institutional effects as well as origins, reproduction, and transformation; it is

well-positioned to tease out the interactions of structure and agents; and it

highlights how asymmetries of power can be created and reinforced by

institutional rules.

Understanding institutional development as a process involving both

change and continuity sensitizes us to the ways in which prior institutional

choices restrict or enable later choices (Pierson and Skocpol 2002: 698), and so

HI shifts our analytical focus to the identiﬁcation of conditions, context, and

contingency. Important HI concepts capturing the ways in which outcomes

are contingent upon past processes include path dependence, sequencing,

critical junctures, and unintended consequences. In addition, HI has more

recently begun to theorize incremental institutional change (as opposed to

Moreover, what all three institutionalist approaches have in common is an understanding of

institutions as “the rules of the game in a society”that both constrain and enable human

interaction (North 1990: 3). This deﬁnition is purposefully broad and can accommodate a

variety of more speciﬁc understandings of institutions, e.g. that of organizations, international

regimes, and informal cultural scripts. Thus, we do not argue that HI distinguishes itself by its

deﬁnition of institutions, instead this deﬁnition is compatible with all institutionalist schools.

Within comparative politics historical institutionalists have given distinctive answers to

questions as diverse as: how formal and informal institutions affect the nature of the welfare state

(Esping-Andersen 1990), or the variety of capitalism that develops in a country (Hall and Soskice

2001), or the capacity of social groups to mobilize (Skocpol 1979), or how institutions act as

structures of power by according institutional privileges (such as veto rights) to certain actors

(Moe 2005; Mahoney and Thelen 2010).

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10 Thomas Rixen and Lora Anne Viola

punctuated change) in the form of layering, conversion, drift, and exhaustion.

With these concepts, discussed further in the next section, HI has moved

beyond the claim that history matters towards theorizing how and under what

conditions it matters. Timing and sequencing are given explanatory status as

factors of institutional development (Pierson 2004: 2–10).

HI’s particular understanding of how history matters leads to an afﬁnity

for certain methods. Most importantly, it naturally leads to thick descrip-

tions of institutional development and of the societal, political, or technical

constraints under which agents make their choices (Sanders 2006: 42–3).

This is in contrast to many rational choice accounts in which analytical

leverage comes precisely from abstraction, empirical simpliﬁcation, and

stylized facts.

But it also differs from sociological approaches, which often

emphasize the existence of social and cognitive constraints without paying

much attention to instrumental agency. HI’s interest in historical and

process-oriented analysis usually implies a methodological preference for

qualitative case study research that builds on dense, empirical description.

Accordingly, most works in the HI tradition are single-case or small-N

studies that use process tracing (Pierson and Skocpol 2002: 713–15). How-

ever, as Theresa Squatrito, Thomas Sommerer, and Jonas Tallberg show in

Chapter 7, the theoretical concepts of HI can usefully be applied within a

large-N framework as well.

1.2.2. Historical Institutionalist Mechanisms

and International Institutions

HI offers IR three broad categories of conceptual resources for explaining

international institutional development. First, HI provides a set of speciﬁc

conceptual tools that help us to move beyond comparative statics and grasp

dynamic processes. Second, HI draws our attention to both exogenous and

endogenous sources of change. Third, HI emphasizes the importance of

looking at the interactions of multiple institutions with implications for the

study of both regime complexes and the interaction between international and

domestic institutions. At the same time, we recognize that HI also has its

weaknesses, and argue that this provides an opportunity for IR scholars to

further develop HI’s conceptual and theoretical foundations.

There are, of course, also rational choice theorists with an interest in analyzing long periods

of time and incorporating contextual knowledge. See Bates et al. (1998).

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Historical Institutionalism and International Relations 11

Tools for Understanding Dynamic Processes and Stability

The central source of historical institutionalism’s explanatory leverage lies in

its commitment to analyzing events over long periods of time and paying

particular attention to the temporal development of institutions. Three central

concepts of HI do this: path dependence, critical juncture, and sequencing.

Path dependence, the concept most associated with HI, has been used

broadly to capture the idea that “history matters”and that outcomes are

contingent. More precisely, path dependence refers to a speciﬁc kind of

process that is set in motion by an initial choice, decision, or event, which

then becomes self-reinforcing. The process is reinforcing because it is subject

to increasing returns, that is, a situation in which the returns to engaging in a

certain behavior or from adopting a certain rule increase over time and make

the adoption of alternatives less attractive (Arthur 1994; David 1985, 2007).

The process is self-reinforcing because it is reinforced through variables

endogenous to the institution. The institution has effects, which then become

causes of subsequent effects, which in turn become causes once again, in an

ongoing feedback loop (Rixen and Viola 2015).

An important insight of path dependence is that an institution character-

ized by increasing returns will become increasingly stable—that is, reversal or

path switching will become harder to achieve and an institution may experi-

ence “lock-in.”But, we argue, it would be a mistake to understand path

dependence as simply an explanation of institutional non-change. Path

dependence allows us to grasp an institution’s increasing stability—that is,

resistance to change—over time. As we discuss in section 1.3, stability is itself

an important attribute of institutions that can vary; an institution can become

more or less stable over time. Path dependence, then, has a logical corollary:

path undermining. Path undermining is the process by which a choice,

decision, or event leads to decreasing returns to a certain behavior or rule,

leading to the unraveling of the institution. Path dependence is a well-

established feature of many institutional developments. Examples from this

volume include the development of the EU’s policies on government subsidies

(Tim Büthe, Chapter 2) and the regionalization of the institutional setup of the

World Health Organization (WHO) (Tine Hanrieder, Chapter 4). Path under-

mining is a more recently recognized phenomenon (see Greif and Laitin

2004). Examples from this volume include changes to the IMF’s poverty

reduction policies that were enabled because the well-established path had

been slowly undermined (Manuela Moschella and Antje Vetterlein,

Chapter 6).

HI also provides us with a concept for understanding the initial contingent

events that can lead to path dependence—the critical juncture. Critical junc-

tures are exogenous decisions or events that interrupt long periods of stability

and set institutions on one path of development rather than another (Capoccia

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12 Thomas Rixen and Lora Anne Viola

and Kelemen 2007). The notion of critical juncture brings another element

of dynamism into understanding institutional development, as these are

moments of relative structural indeterminism in which agency matters and

choices are possible. Critical junctures also provide a way to think about the

difference between rapid changes and gradual ones. Critical junctures, like the

notion of punctuated equilibrium, imply a model of change in which long

periods of stasis are disrupted by short bursts of change which are, in turn,

followed again by long periods of path dependence. In this volume, Squatrito,

Sommerer, and Tallberg (Chapter 7) argue that the end of the Cold War

represents a critical juncture with respect to the opening up of intergovern-

mental organizations (IGOs) to civil society groups. But periods of institu-

tional stability may also develop gradually over time, even in the absence of an

important exogenous shock, as returns to an unremarkable initial investment

slowly increase. For example, the decision to use bilateral rather than multi-

lateral agreements to avoid double taxation seemed natural in the 1920s and

only became locked in over the following decades as states concluded double

tax agreements in gradually increasing numbers. Today this bilateralism

cannot be easily reversed despite unintended consequences in the form of

tax evasion and avoidance (Rixen 2011; Genschel and Rixen 2015).

Finally, HI’s emphasis on the historical development of an institution

focuses our attention on the signiﬁcance of the sequence of events for the

outcome of change processes. Mahoney (2000) develops the notion of a

“reactive sequence”as an event chain in which events following a trigger are

a reaction to prior events. Subsequent institutional choices are to some extent

constrained by prior choices, and they enjoy a lower degree of freedom. Often,

arguments based on sequencing look at the effects of intersections of events, or

causal chains, and point to cumulative causal logics. While path dependence

can be considered a case of sequencing, sequencing can also characterize other

dynamic processes which may not be characterized by increasing returns, but

for which the exact order of the unfolding of decisions or events matters for

the outcome. Moschella and Vetterlein (Chapter 6), for example, trace the

different effects of reinforcing and reactive sequences on the IMF’s formula-

tion of policies in the areas of poverty reduction and ﬁnancial market

supervision.

The three central explanatory tools of HI, path dependence, critical junc-

tures, and sequencing, all underscore the need to consider the conditions and

contingency of change processes. In doing so, HI highlights the possibility of

unintended consequences to an extent missing in both rational choice and

sociological institutionalism.

Unintended consequences is the notion that an

Unintended consequences do of course also feature in rational choice theories, e.g. within

the prisoners’dilemma. Nevertheless, there is also a functionalist branch of rational choice which

postulates efﬁcient institutional design (e.g. Williamson 1985). Likewise, sociological

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Historical Institutionalism and International Relations 13

institution does not (only) have the desired effects but exhibits unintended

side effects (Merton 1936). The dynamics of trade liberalization are an

example. After the dispute settlement system in the WTO became more

legalized, subsequent trade negotiations experienced stalemate, possibly

because states were unwilling to grant too many concessions in agreements

that were likely to be fully enforced (Goldstein and Steinberg 2009).

Focus on Endogenous Sources of Change

In focusing on the historical unfolding of an institution, HI is sensitized to the

effects of past institutional development on subsequent changes; in other

words, it reveals endogenous sources of change and stability. One limitation

of rationalist explanations is that they can only account for changes to or away

from an equilibrium, but cannot make sense of changes within an equilibrium

(Greif and Laitin 2004; Mahoney and Thelen 2010). HI, in contrast, while

recognizing the importance of exogenous sources of change (e.g. in the form of

critical junctures), also makes use of mechanisms that capture endogenous

sources of change.

With respect to exogenous factors, the HI model of punctuated equilibrium

hypothesizes that institutions undergo long periods of stasis interrupted by

short periods of change. In this model institutional change is caused by a

signiﬁcant exogenous shock, which enables a new trajectory that will, in turn,

exhibit stability over time (Krasner 1984; Baumgartner and Jones 2009). Other

HI scholarship has argued that the punctuated equilibrium model of abrupt

change is insufﬁcient to adequately capture empirical reality because change

can also happen incrementally, as when change occurs gradually within

moments of seeming stability (Thelen 1999, 2003).

HI scholars have therefore

recently begun to investigate processes of incremental change as the result of

endogenous processes. Streeck and Thelen (2005), for example, identify ﬁve

common patterns of incremental change. Layering happens when new elem-

ents are attached to existing institutions so that they gradually transform their

goals or structure; conversion happens when an old institution is redeployed

to a new purpose; drift occurs if actors refuse to engage in the maintenance of

an institution despite external pressures; exhaustion is the gradual breakdown

of an institution that may occur in the form of “self-consumption,”or

institutionalism does not, per se, rule out the possibility of unintended consequences, but neither

does it particularly highlight this possibility.

Douglass North even argues that there is hardly any abrupt change in social life. If one

zooms in close enough on seemingly abrupt changes, one will notice that in fact they are of a

more gradual nature (North 1990: 83–104). That incrementalism is indeed often observed even

after large exogenous shocks and, despite great expectations of radical change, can also be

witnessed in the efforts at re-regulating ﬁnancial markets after the ﬁnancial crisis of 2008

(Moschella and Tsingou 2013).

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14 Thomas Rixen and Lora Anne Viola

self-undermining; and displacement characterizes a situation where a subor-

dinate institution rises in salience relative to a dominant one.

HI has helped to identify where and when we are likely to see endogenous

sources of change emerge (see also Zürn, Chapter 8). Investments in the initial

design or structure of an institution can function as the source of increasing

returns and self-reinforcement, exerting inﬂuence over future developments.

Endogenous sources of self-reinforcement can also occur when engaging in a

certain behavior or adopting a certain rule makes it more likely that others will

do so as well (coordination effects and adaptive expectations). A third set of

endogenous mechanisms driving institutional development can come from

cognitive frames; for example, when actors learn from their institutional

experiences, they may gain increasing returns to retaining that institution

(Pierson 2004: 24–44). One could argue, for example, that despite initial

skepticism, emerging economies are more likely to remain committed to

working through the Group of Twenty (G20) the more they invest resources

in setting up specialized organizational capacity within their ministries to

participate, the more others choose to work through the G20, and as they

learn the skills necessary to use the summit process to their advantage (see

Martinez-Diaz and Woods 2009). Finally, Mahoney and Thelen (2010) have

recently theorized the sources of endogenous gradual change by looking at

how institutions distribute power in such a way as to encourage speciﬁc agents

to pursue distinctive strategies that result in incremental change. One key

insight here is that institutions that look stable at any moment in time are

likely to reveal a series of internal, incremental changes when looked at over a

longer period. The implication for scholars is that studying institutional

stability can provide valuable insights for explaining the emergence of insti-

tutional change.

HI’s attention to endogenous sources of change is instructive and we take it

up seriously in this volume. In our estimation, however, in an effort to focus

attention on endogenous as opposed to exogenous change, HI has been

neglectful of the ways in which these sources of change surely interact. In

Chapter 2, for example, Büthe’s argument improves upon this deﬁcit by

theorizing a more convincing connection between agency and structure.

Further work remains to be done on theorizing how endogenous and exogen-

ous factors work together to effect change.

New Insights on Institutional Interaction

Because HI stresses the importance of institutional networks and institutional

environments, using HI concepts also promises to open new perspectives on

the interplay of institutions. Thus, HI is well-situated to weigh in on two

prominent issues in IR. First, it can contribute to the debate about institutional

or regime complexes (e.g. Alter and Meunier 2009; Gehring and Faude 2014).

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Historical Institutionalism and International Relations 15

Rather than focusing on rational actors’interest in forum shopping, an HI

account would explain the existence of partially overlapping institutions in one

issue area by studying the endogenously created unintended consequences of

institutional choices. For example, in this volume Orfeo Fioretos (Chapter 3)

argues that responses to the ﬁnancial crisis drew on earlier reform attempts to

layer on new institutions, such as the Financial Stability Board (FSB), and

“retroﬁt”existing ones, such as the G20.

Second, HI provides a useful perspective from which to view the interaction

of domestic and international politics (Farrell and Newman 2014). As Fioretos

(2001), Farrell and Newman (2010), and Büthe and Mattli (2011) have argued,

the preferences and bargaining strength of governments at the international

level will not only be determined by the preferences of important societal

actors (e.g. Lake 2009b) and market size (e.g. Drezner 2007) or other potential

indicators of power, but also by the particular institutional and regulatory

capacity that has developed in the domestic realm. In this sense the insights of

HI—and in particular the notions of sticky institutions, institutional comple-

mentarities, and distinctive national regulatory systems or public policy

regimes—offer alternative hypotheses on both governments’(or, if we disag-

gregate the state, agencies’) preferences as well as their bargaining strengths in

international institutions. For example, it has been argued that in the regula-

tion of commodities markets, US product standard-setters are disadvantaged

in international standard-setting vis-à-vis their European competitors because

of their more anarchic domestic institutions (Büthe and Mattli 2011). Thus,

institutions created and reinforced domestically can later have important

consequences on institutional change at the international level. Fioretos

(Chapter 3) explores how divisions between liberal market economies and

coordinated market economies inﬂuenced regulatory debates and ﬁnancial

sector reform policies after 2008. Conversely, international institutions, espe-

cially as they gain regulatory power over traditionally “behind the border”

issues, can over time inﬂuence governments’preferences on domestic and

foreign policy.

Enhancing Historical Institutionalism

While HI has helped to advance our understanding of institutional develop-

ment, we recognize that HI also has its weaknesses. In particular, much of HI

has been developed out of inductive reasoning, deriving general concepts from

speciﬁc empirical case studies (Skocpol 1995). While HI’s closeness to empir-

ical research has certainly been one of its strengths, it has resulted in a

collection of concepts prone to be interpreted differently in different cases

and only loosely held together by a common theoretical reasoning (Pierson

2004; Rixen and Viola 2015). HI concepts such as path dependence, feedback,

or critical junctures can exhibit a woolliness that contributes to their ﬂexibility

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16 Thomas Rixen and Lora Anne Viola

and transferability, but makes the derivation of testable hypotheses and cross-

case comparison difﬁcult, diminishing their analytical leverage.

Moreover, HI concepts sometimes walk a blurry line between description

and explanation. Streeck and Thelen’s inventory of incremental change

patterns, for example, serves to describe types of change (e.g. layering or

conversion), but only implicitly contains explanatory claims. This ambiguity

can be seen in how the literature sometimes treats these types as descriptions

and sometimes as explanations, even when explicit causal mechanisms are

missing. As Mahoney and Thelen note in this context, “[i]f theorizing is

going to reach its potential, however, institutional analysts must go beyond

classiﬁcation to develop causal propositions”(Mahoney and Thelen

2010: 3).

These weaknesses, we argue, represent an opportunity to adapt and reﬁne

HI. We are already seeing several conscious attempts to more rigorously

theorize HI concepts (e.g. Pierson 2004; Mahoney and Thelen 2010;

Capoccia and Kelemen 2007; Soifer 2012; Rixen and Viola 2015). With this

volume we want to contribute to these efforts at maximizing HI’s explanatory

potential. We begin this effort in the next section where we propose a new

conceptualization of key terms of institutional development: stasis, change,

and stability of institutions.

1.3. CONCEPTUALIZING INSTITUTIONAL

DEVELOPMENT: RE-THINKING

STABILITY AND CHANGE

While HI provides useful tools for improving IR’s understanding of the

relationship between continuity and change, scholarship on institutional

development in general suffers from the absence of clearly deﬁned concepts

of stasis, stability, and change. Even among historical institutionalists there is a

debate about what exactly constitutes “change”or “stability,”what distin-

guishes “incremental change”from “punctuated change”(Thelen 2003;

Pierson 2004; Boas 2007), and how to distinguish exogenous from endogenous

change (Greif and Laitin 2004). Such disputes are usually not conﬂicts over

how to interpret empirical facts, but more often revolve around differing

understandings of the meaning of concepts. In order to systematically develop

hypotheses on its causes and consequences, we must ﬁrst be able to clearly and

rigorously deﬁne what constitutes institutional development. Thus, in this

section we momentarily shift the focus away from HI’s explanatory framework

in favor of deductively thinking about the ways in which the central explan-

andum “institutional development”can vary.

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Historical Institutionalism and International Relations 17

By using the term “institutional development”rather than “institutional

change,”we mean to draw attention to the complete spectrum of empirical

possibilities, from no change (i.e. stasis), to differing degrees and speeds of

change. We carefully distinguish change, stability, and stasis; a differentiation

that is often obscured in the literature. While stasis simply means non-change,

stability is an institutional attribute (i.e. robustness to change) and can itself be

subject to variation.

What we aim to do in the following is to clarify the dimensions along which

any institutional feature can change. Institutions have any number of attri-

butes that can change over time and be the focus of study.

In fact, it is most

likely impossible to catalogue a priori all the different ways in which an

institution might change. In contrast to previous classiﬁcations, most notably

Streeck and Thelen’sﬁve categories, we want to introduce a generic under-

standing not dependent on having correctly and completely identiﬁed all

empirical patterns by which institutional change and non-change can occur.

We argue that any institutional attribute that undergoes change will do so

along certain identiﬁable dimensions—speed, scope, and depth. These dimen-

sions help us to identify and measure changes relative to some reference point

(e.g. other institutions or the same institution in a previous period). In what

follows we ﬁrst introduce and discuss these dimensions. We then discuss how

this exercise exposes a number of gaps in our understanding of change and

reveals a number of assumptions about how change happens that have not

been empirically tested or theoretically defended. We suggest that our con-

ceptualization can serve as a useful guide for more systematic empirical

research and theory-building.

1.3.1. The Dimensions of Change

Change means that a given thing (an object, person, institution, property, etc.)

existing at time one (t

) is discernibly different at time two (t

). This deﬁnition

implies three fundamental qualities of change: it happens over time with a

particular speed (the rate of change), and it has a particular magnitude (the

extent of difference), which consists of two components: scope, that is the

number of institutional features affected by change, and depth, the degree to

which these features change. Taking all three—speed, scope, and depth—

together allows us to systematically describe and compare change processes.

Recent literature on international institutions has been interested in a range of changing

attributes, such as variation in an institution’s degree of hierarchy (e.g. Lake 2009a), variation in

institutional authority (Zürn et al. 2012), institutional independence from principals (e.g.

Hawkins et al. 2006), or institutional legitimacy (Franck 1990).

For a related, but somewhat different usage of the terms scope and depth in the literatures

on European integration and federalism, see e.g. Börzel (2005) and Hooghe and Marks (2012).

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18 Thomas Rixen and Lora Anne Viola

A change can only be observed over time. While time refers to how long the

change takes to occur, or the duration between time t

and time t

,speed refers

to the rate of change. Speed can be understood as the extent of change divided

by the time it takes to occur. Speed allows us to compare different change

processes by giving us a relative measure of slowness and fastness. For

instance, if we observe two institutions over the same period of time and

one undergoes a larger extent of change than the other, then we can say that

the change process was faster in the ﬁrst one than the second one. This

corresponds to an important and often-discussed distinction in the literature:

incremental vs. punctuated change (e.g. Thelen 1999; Heijden 2011). The

speed at which change happens can only be considered “long”or “short”

relative to other changes. While we could thus in principle deﬁne one common

reference point for comparing the speed of change in all institutions—such as

using the speed of European integration as a baseline—it does not make much

sense to impose this arbitrary assignment on diverse empirical phenomena.

Instead, it makes more sense to think of speed in terms of reference points

chosen according to the speciﬁc research question, the speciﬁc case under

investigation, and/or to certain theoretical expectations.

Because change means a discernible difference between time t

and time t

a comparison across time also yields information about the extent of the

difference. The extent of the difference between t

and t

can be measured in

terms of the scope and depth of change. The scope, or breadth, of change

can be measured in terms of how many additional (or fewer) attributes an

institution has in t

than it had in t

. The institutional attributes that

can change in scope are virtually inﬁnite and must be empirically determined,

but they can include features such as the number of members within an

institution, the number of issues over which an institution has regulatory

authority, or whether an institution has gained legitimacy in a new policy

area. Institutions often change by expanding the scope of their membership,

such as the WTO’s inclusion of China or the G7’s expansion to the G8 and

then the G20 (Viola 2014). Büthe (Chapter 2) explains how the European

Commission extended its policy scope by gaining regulatory authority over

areas where it previously had none. Similarly, Rixen (2011) has shown that the

international tax regime, initially focused solely on liberalizing capital and

goods ﬂows by avoiding double taxation, over time took on board (modest)

measures against tax evasion and avoidance.

The depth of change can be understood as the degree to which an institu-

tion’s attributes in t

have strengthened or weakened in t

. By strengthened or

weakened we mean whether institutional features are becoming more (or less)

robust to change. Depth indicates an institution is likely to be more robust in

the face of shocks. An increase in depth would mean that an institution

(or institutional feature) in t

is more resistant to change than it was in t

.It

has become more stable. When historical institutionalists refer to path

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Historical Institutionalism and International Relations 19

dependence, we argue that they are referring to changes in depth. Path

dependence is, in our reading, a change in which one institution (or institu-

tional feature) becomes ever more stable over time (Rixen and Viola 2015).

This implies a crucial distinction between stability and stasis. Whereas stasis

simply means non-change of some institutional attribute, the stability of an

institutional attribute is variable and can undergo change over time.

Of course, institutions do not only experience increases in depth. As some

recent contributions note, undermining—or the process by which an institu-

tion becomes weaker and more shallow—is just as feasible an institutional

development as reproduction and reinforcement (Greif and Laitin 2004;

Rixen and Viola 2015; and Zürn, Chapter 8). An institution’s legitimacy, for

example, can become stronger over time, allowing it to be more resistant to

shocks, or it can erode over time. Similarly, a norm can be more or less deeply

internalized, which will tell us something about how easily it can be over-

turned or undermined. The norm against assassinating heads of state, for

example, has arguably become weaker over time (i.e. less deep) even though it

did not change in scope (the scope being that the norm applies to heads of

state) (Thomas 2000). The institution has become less stable.

Similarly, changes in the compliance pull of an institution reﬂect changes in

the depth of institutional authority, even in the absence of a change in

regulatory scope. Some scholars have argued that the codiﬁcation of law, for

example customary international law, may increase its compliance pull, rep-

resenting a change in depth. Even in the absence of codiﬁcation, customary

international law can become deeper, or more stable, over time through the

mechanism of precedence. The more often a precedent is invoked, the stron-

ger the customary law becomes, even when there is no change in the scope of

the law (Abbott and Snidal 2002).

While changes in scope and changes in depth are most intuitively under-

stood as changes within an institution, a large change in either scope or depth

(or both) might mean that an institution in t

no longer resembles the

institution in t

. Changes in both the scope and the depth of the GATT in

the early 1990s, for example, warranted treating the WTO as a new institution.

Recent reforms to the Financial Stability Forum (FSF)—both in terms of scope

(the extension of membership as well as policy competence) and depth

(greater authority especially with respect to monitoring and surveillance)—

have resulted in a change of name from the FSF to the Financial Stability

Board (FSB). There is signiﬁcant continuity between the FSF and FSB

(Helleiner 2014), but the change of name also indicates the sensibility that

the FSB is a new institution (see Fioretos, Chapter 3). The changes in NATO

over the 1990s, in contrast, have not led to a re-labeling of the organization as

something “new.”It is not our purpose here to establish criteria by which we

could judge when changes within an existing institution are so signiﬁcant as to

result in the creation of a new institution. Rather, we want to emphasize that

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20 Thomas Rixen and Lora Anne Viola

taking into account the speed, scope, and depth of institutional change can

shed light both on the more familiar case in which an institution undergoes an

obvious change, which may be stabilizing or destabilizing, as well as situations

in which institutions remain apparently stable, even unchanging, over time

but still experience signiﬁcant transformation.

1.3.2. Common Assumptions about the Nature

of Institutional Change

Studies of institutional change might focus on all or only one or two dimen-

sions of change. It is unproblematic that some studies are more interested in

explaining the speed of change while others are interested in explaining the

extent of change. What is problematic, we argue, is not being explicit about

which dimensions are at stake. The HI literature, for instance, does not always

distinguish between the two dimensions of speed and scope. We can see this in

the fact that “radical,”“incremental,”and “gradual”are terms sometimes used

to characterize both the speed of change and also its extent. Both “radical”and

“punctuated”change can refer to the magnitude or to the speed of change.

Similarly, “incremental”and “gradual”are often used indiscriminately to refer

to small speed and small scope. Sometimes it is not clear which type of

variation is being explained—scope, depth, or speed.

Perhaps more problematic is that underlying this slippage in terms is a set

of implicit—and untested—assumptions about how the dimensions of change

are likely to vary. One implicit assumption in parts of the HI literature is that

the speed of change is positively correlated with the extent of change. That is,

that slow change implies a small extent of change, while fast change implies a

large magnitude of change. For example, path-dependent developments with a

small extent of change are often depicted as slow and happening over the

course of time (e.g. North 1990: 83–104) and radical, punctuated equilibrium

changes as happening rapidly. There is, however, no a priori theoretical reason

to presume these relations.

If, as we proposed earlier, speed should be understood as a relationship

between the amount of time in which a change takes place, then all logical

combinations between speed and extent are possible when time is allowed to

vary. Changes of large magnitude can happen quickly or slowly, and speedy

changes can occur without a large increase in scope or depth. So, for example,

we can imagine an institution changing speedily because the implementation

of the change happened in a short time frame but the actual scope and/or depth

of the change was minimal. In fact, the implicit assumption of a naturally

positive correspondence between speed and scope has recently been chal-

lenged. Streeck and Thelen (2005) and Mahoney and Thelen (2010) and

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Historical Institutionalism and International Relations 21

their collaborators show that big changes often occur as a series of small and

slow-moving changes; a signiﬁcant transformation results from longer periods

of incremental change. This insight is readily made when we systematically

deconstruct change into its component dimensions, which opens up a full set of

possible combinations between speed, scope, and depth that can then be

systematically theorized.

The disaggregation of change into the three dimensions also reveals a set of

common, but untested, causal assumptions. The literature often assumes an

implicit connection between the speed of change and the speed of its causes;

for instance, that quickly occurring causal variables, such as sudden shocks,

lead to rapid change. This is the idea that a sudden event, such as a ﬁnancial

crisis, will lead to rapid change such as the quick passage of new regulatory

legislation (see Fioretos, Chapter 3). By the same logic, slow acting causal

variables should lead to slow or incremental change. But there is no a priori

reason to assume that the speed of change is a function of the speed of its

causes. In fact, it is logically possible that a slow cause can lead to either a slow

or rapid change, and a fast cause can lead to either a rapid or slow change. It

seems plausible that there are relevant cases where changes in the dependent

variable and changes in the independent variables occur at a different pace.

For example, there may be threshold effects, where some (independent)

variable is slowly increasing with no effect on the functioning of the institu-

tion, until it reaches a certain threshold at which abrupt change occurs (see e.g.

Pierson 2004: 93–4).

Another implicit assumption widespread in the literature is that there is a

causal connection between the speed of change and the type of cause. Two

types of causes identiﬁed in the literature are endogenous and exogenous

causes.

It is commonly assumed, perhaps inﬂuenced by the idea of critical

junctures, that exogenous forces cause rapid change. Examples are major

shocks like wars, revolutions, or ﬁnancial crises. Likewise, many historical

institutionalists assume that endogenous change is most likely to be slow

and incremental (Fioretos 2011: 377).

The implicit hypothesis here is that,

because endogenous variables, by their nature, work from within the institu-

tion of which they are a part, endogenously caused change, if it occurs at all,

might meet with more resistance and thus move slowly. Path dependence, for

example, has become virtually synonymous with incremental change. But

here, too, there is no a priori reason to think that endogenously caused change

A variable is endogenous when its value is determined or inﬂuenced by the institution in

question, and it in turn affects that institution’s development. Variables are exogenous to an

institution when they are not controlled or determined by that institution, but they may

nevertheless affect its development.

For example, Heijden (2011: 10) writes: “a broad distinction can be made between those

studying major change as a result of exogenous shocks, and those studying ongoing incremental

change.”

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22 Thomas Rixen and Lora Anne Viola

would occur more gradually or incrementally than exogenously caused

change. And HI does not provide a theoretical reason why this relationship

should always hold. A ﬁnancial crisis (as an exogenous shock), for example,

may cause a slow-moving process of regulatory reform. Speed is simply a

description of how change occurs and does not on its own offer a causal story.

Our point here is that these relationships ought to be theorized and explicitly

tested rather than implicitly assumed. Explicitly conceptualizing change along

the three dimensions allows us to more systematically hypothesize relations of

correlation and causation, and this conceptualization will inform all the

studies in this volume.

1.4. OUTLINE OF THE BOOK

We have made a case for the relevance and promise of HI for IR. IR can learn

much from HI’s explicit attention to dynamic processes, its engagement of

endogenous sources of change, and its emphasis on the interaction of institu-

tions. We also recognize that HI on its own—like the other institutional

approaches—is not a fully constituted theory of institutional change. Accord-

ingly, the chapters to follow contribute to two important tasks. They show that

existing concepts of HI can help us to better understand and explain inter-

national institutional change, and that a fresh disciplinary focus on HI can

serve to develop its conceptual and theoretical foundations.

The empirical chapters address a range of institutions of interest to IR,

including the IMF, the ﬁnancial regulatory regime, the European Commission,

the World Health Organization, and the United Nations Security Council. The

chapters also demonstrate the diversity of methods that can be used within an

HI approach, from process tracing to comparative case study analysis to large-

N analysis. The cases also vary in the types of institutional attributes that are

changing. One set of chapters focuses on changing substantive rules and

policies. Fioretos in his contribution addresses changes in the regulatory

content of prudential ﬁnancial regulation. Moschella and Vetterlein explain

the IMF’s gradual shift away from an income-approach to poverty reduction.

Büthe explains how the EU Commission gained regulatory authority over

government subsidy provisions, where previously such authority had been

absent. Another set of contributions seeks to explain change or non-change in

procedural rules and organizational structure. Alexandru Grigorescu explains

why and when IGO executive bodies change their rules of membership to

become more inclusive. Squatrito, Sommerer, and Tallberg analyze changes in

the formal rules governing access of civil society organizations to policy-

making processes in IGOs. Hanrieder focuses on how initial conﬂicting

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Historical Institutionalism and International Relations 23

preferences over a centralized versus a decentralized organizational structure

affected the subsequent development of the WHO.

Each chapter employs one or more of the three main conceptual tools of HI

(path dependence, critical junctures, and sequencing) and explicitly employs

the conceptualization of the dimensions of change (speed, scope, and depth)

set out in this introduction. The ﬁrst two contributions—Büthe and Fioretos—

both focus on incremental processes of international institutional change that

are highly inﬂuenced by domestic coalitions, leading to unintended outcomes.

Büthe’s chapter analyzes an increase in the depth and scope of supranational

European authority over government subsidies. The argument emphasizes the

importance of timing, sequencing, and self-reinforcing processes in explaining

this institutional outcome. In particular, early steps towards greater market

integration created new, and unanticipated, market actor preferences for

greater supranational authority with respect to state aid. Büthe develops an

actor-centered approach to HI in order to allow him to combine RI’s assump-

tion of actors’strategic rationality with HI assumptions about the feedback

role played by institutions in shaping and re-shaping actor interests over time.

In this sense, the chapter proposes an important reﬁnement of HI in order to

derive hypotheses about when we are likely to see institutional change in

global governance.

Fioretos investigates changes to ﬁnancial sector regulations in the wake of

the last global ﬁnancial crisis and argues that the absence of fundamental

reform should not be equated with the absence of important changes. While

many argue that regulatory reforms did not transform the ﬁnancial sector,

Fioretos shows how paying attention to incremental changes reveals an

unprecedented scope of reforms. The critical juncture of the crisis led to

speedy reforms followed by an intense incrementalism that expanded the

scope of regulations and appears to have increased the depth, or durability,

of institutions. Pre-crisis institutions were converted to deal with new issues

and new layers of governance were added onto existing institutions. In

particular, Fioretos argues that an interaction of domestic and international

reform efforts led to the “retroﬁtting”of regulatory systems. In this way, like

Büthe, Fioretos points to the feedback effects that occur between domestic and

international actors.

The next three contributions—Hanrieder, Grigorescu, and Moschella and

Vetterlein—all focus on the importance of sequencing and path dependence

for explaining particular institutional developments. In Chapter 4 Hanrieder

investigates the depth of the regionalized organizational structure of the

WHO. She demonstrates how the sequence of events during an organization’s

founding moment can set the international organization on a course of path

dependence, with long-lasting consequences for its future operation and

prospects for reform. She argues that the WHO’s de facto regionalization

was conditioned by the coalition formed around the pre-existing Pan

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24 Thomas Rixen and Lora Anne Viola

American Sanitary Bureau, a result not anticipated by the WHO’s founders

but that has proven, over time, deeply robust to many later reform attempts.

Grigorescu focuses on the speed, scope, and depth of changes to the

membership rules of the executive bodies of IGOs. Focusing on the UN

Security Council and the Council of the League of Nations, Grigorescu

shows how the speed, scope, and depth of changes to the rules for permanent

and non-permanent membership varied. He then uses HI to explain why, over

the past century, some attempts to change membership rules were successful

while others were not. The answer lies in the particular sequence in which

prior reforms were undertaken. If reform efforts unfold at a time when

organizations are already transparent and inclusive of civil society organiza-

tions, powerful states are more likely to accept broader state membership

rules. If the pressure to reform comes before an IGO has opened up to civil

society, it can be diffused by ﬁrst adopting secondary reforms.

Moschella and Vetterlein highlight how a reﬁned version of path depend-

ence can account for the depth of policy change within the IMF. Comparing a

case of self-reinforcing path dependence (i.e. the process of change through

which the Fund has acquired responsibility over poverty reduction) and a case

of reactive path dependence (i.e. the process of change through which the IMF

developed policies of ﬁnancial surveillance over time), this chapter discloses

the mechanisms that account for the divergent organizational changes in these

two cases. Importantly, the authors argue that this nuanced approach to path

dependence needs to be combined with insights from sociological institution-

alism in order to understand why some changes are “down the path”while

others are “off the path.”

Chapter 7, by Squatrito, Sommerer, and Tallberg, explores the extent to

which the notion of critical junctures can explain institutional dynamics. They

show that since 1950 international organizations have undergone a dramatic

shift away from exclusively interstate cooperation toward more complex

forms of governance involving the participation of transnational actors

(TNAs). Building on a data set of ﬁfty IGOs they ﬁrst provide a detailed

description of the speed, scope, and depth of this process and then go on to ask

how it can be explained. They argue that the opening up of IGOs to TNAs

after 1990 has been driven by two structural factors—deepening cooperation

among nation states and domestic democratization—in combination with the

end of the Cold War as a critical juncture. The authors are very careful to use

strict criteria to identify the end of the Cold War as a critical juncture with

respect to the process they analyze and thus address a shortcoming in some

existing applications of the concept: while historical institutionalists have

convincingly shown that critical junctures can have pervasive consequences,

they have not systematically analyzed the origins of these events. With their

chapter, Squatrito, Sommerer, and Tallberg demonstrate that the concepts of

HI cannot only be used in small-N but also in large-N research.

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Historical Institutionalism and International Relations 25

Finally, in the concluding discussion, Zürn draws out lessons from the

preceding chapters in order to assess the extent to which HI can be usefully

transferred to IR. Against objections that the international system is not

institutionally “thick”enough to be subject to the dynamics outlined by HI,

he shows that the international realm is largely subject to the same conditions

that make HI concepts tractable at the domestic level—indeed, international

institutions are getting older and stronger and more clearly embedded in

complex inter-relationships. Finally, Zürn discusses how we should best

understand HI in relation to the other theories of institutions within IR. It is

with this debate that we close this introductory chapter.

1.5. WHAT PLACE FOR HI IN IR?

Having made the case that HI ought to have a place within institutionalist

IR, the question remains, what place? If IR is to turn to HI, what role should

HI have in IR? Indeed, there is a growing debate about the relative status of

the various institutionalist theories (Nexon 2012; Fioretos 2011; Bell 2011;

Jupille et al. 2013, 20816). Should HI be integrated synthetically with RI and

SI? Should it be elevated to its own theoretical tradition, on par with ration-

alism and constructivism? Or is it a via media in the rationalist–constructivist

rivalry?

In this debate the status of HI hinges on whether one sees it as having its

own hard theoretical core and distinct microfoundations (i.e. its own assump-

tions about human agency and preferences). As we see it, there are three

positions in the literature. First, the “synthesis”approach essentially sees HI as

having insights compatible with and capable of being integrated into RI or

SI. It has two variants. One version argues that HI rests on claims and

assumptions that are indistinguishable from those of RI or SI, respectively.

For example, Barnett and Finnemore (2004) invoke a sociological/construct-

ivist approach to institutions while at the same time incorporating important

insights associated with HI. Likewise, Bates (1998) argues in a distinctly

rationalist vein that implicitly incorporates HI notions. This approach

becomes problematic when it uses HI concepts as stopgap tools brought in

to plug the holes left by other theories; in other words, where HI is engaged

simply to explain the error term or residuals rather than being recognized for

its theoretical distinctness and independence.

A further problem with this

approach is that it picks and chooses insights from different paradigms

This is an RI approach that, for instance, draws on HI to help explain suboptimal or

inefﬁcient outcomes despite clearly ordered actor preferences. Or, this is an SI approach that has

difﬁculty explaining change and so draws on the HI notion of critical juncture.

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26 Thomas Rixen and Lora Anne Viola

without regard to theoretical coherence and epistemological/ontological con-

sistency. Indeed, arguments have been made that HI can be subsumed under

both RI and SI, even though the latter two have very different ontologies and

microfoundations.

While this might point to HI’s own lack of ontological

and epistemological commitments—a point to which we return below—we

maintain that the subsumption of HI under its competitors does not do justice

to the distinctness of the approach.

The other variant of the synthesis approach argues that the insights of

HI can be combined with another approach to create a “new”institutionalism.

This strategy has been pursued in particular by those seeking to re-balance

the ﬁeld’s focus on agency and structure. “Rational Choice Historical Institu-

tionalism”(RCHI), for example, combines RI and HI in the attempt to correct

for HI’s perceived over-emphasis on stability to the neglect of agency

(Lindner and Rittberger 2003). In a mirror-image move, the institutional

choice theory termed USCC, developed by Jupille, Mattli, and Snidal (2013),

combines HI and RI in an attempt to bring a corrective focus on structural

constraints to the overly agency-oriented RI. Others have argued for a new,

agent-oriented constructivist or “discursive”institutionalism (Schmidt 2010),

that combines insights from SI and HI. This approach gives signiﬁcant

weight to moments of “great transformation,”leading to a strong emphasis

on the role of crisis in creating rapid changes. It is questionable, however,

whether we need any more “new”new institutionalisms—especially because

these represent not new theories as such, but new applications or combin-

ations of existing theories. As exempliﬁed in a number of chapters in this

volume (see e.g. Büthe in Chapter 2 and Moschella and Vetterlein in

Chapter 6) and discussed by Zürn in the conclusion, the exercise is indeed to

see how existing approaches can be “blended,”but without a proliferation of

new labels.

The second response to the question of HI’s place in IR is to argue that HI

should be considered a distinct tradition on par with rational choice institu-

tionalism and sociological institutionalism. Fioretos, for example, sees HI as

having a discrete theoretical core and as having microfoundations which

distinguish it from both RI and SI. While acknowledging that HI scholars

have not explicated the microfoundations of their approach, he maintains that

they share certain assumptions about how the past ﬁgures into actors’evalu-

ations of alternatives and that these common assumptions, which are broadly

in line with bounded rationality and prospect theory, can be seen as HI’s

It has of course also been argued that SI and RI can be subsumed under each other.

Without getting into the debate on this issue here (see e.g. Fearon and Wendt 2002; Zürn and

Checkel 2005), we do take the position that, while the two approaches can be usefully combined,

both maintain a hard core made up of different ontological and microfoundational commit-

ments that prevent a subsumption.

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Historical Institutionalism and International Relations 27

implicit microfoundations (Fioretos 2011, 373–6). This position notwith-

standing, there is still no consensus on whether HI has distinct microfounda-

tions or what they are (Nexon 2012). An additional problem with advocating

for a stark tripartite division of institutionalisms in IR is that it sets up HI as a

competitor with other approaches. As we read the current state of institution-

alist work, however, there is greater interest in and innovation coming from

using blends rather than in perpetuating a purist commitment to either of

the three paradigms. Three-cornered ﬁghts are giving way to eclecticism in

institutionalist theorizing (Sil and Katzenstein 2010).

The third, “via media,”response stakes out a middle ground between

seeing HI as merely a sub-part of another theory and seeing it as its

own paradigm to rival rationalism and constructivism. This perspective

acknowledges HI’s distinctness but sees its usefulness primarily in combin-

ation with different approaches. This position credits HI with having its

own discrete theoretical core developed around a distinct set of analytical

concepts and theoretical models (Fioretos 2011; Katznelson and Weingast

2005). For this reason, HI cannot simply be subsumed under either of the

two established institutionalist approaches or newly made up additional

institutionalisms, but should be viewed as an institutionalist school in its

own right. At the same time, however, there are currently no strong onto-

logical commitments or a shared set of explicit microfoundations within

scholarship identifying itself as HI. Indeed, in the via media view, HI, unlike

RI and SI, cannot be coherently reconstructed in terms of a singular theory

of individual action.

The acknowledged indeterminacy of HI’s microfoundations may be one of

its strengths. If most human action falls in the range between a pure “logic of

appropriateness”and a pure “logic of consequences,”self-consciously embra-

cing the indeterminacy in HI’s microfoundations may allow the analyst to

capture a broader range of motives. Rather than committing to a logic of

action ex ante, it leaves the question to be decided by each empirical case. This

position embraces the idea that HI may be, and has in fact long been,

conducted from both more rationalist and more sociological perspectives.

As Zürn discusses in the conclusion to this volume, HI’s compatibility with

other theoretical traditions is a particular strength of HI. In this sense, he

argues, HI should not be viewed as a new “paradigm”or “grand theory”of

institutional stability and change, but rather as a coherent set of mid-range

theoretical tools. In such a pluralist understanding, HI is recognized as having

a distinct theoretical core characterized by its dual commitment to the

importance of temporality and to endogenizing institutions but one that is

ontologically naive and compatible with various theories of social action

(Nexon 2012; Thelen 1999).

No matter how it is ultimately incorporated in the ﬁeld, the case studies in

this volume demonstrate that HI provides IR with a distinct set of conceptual

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28 Thomas Rixen and Lora Anne Viola

tools and mechanisms for understanding international institutions. With it we

are better equipped to investigate the complex ways in which change and

continuity mix, to show how institutional stability provides insights for

explaining the emergence of institutional change, and to understand the

ways in which situated agency and instrumentalized structures interact.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

We thank all participants of the two WZB workshops for their constructive feedback.

Draft versions of this chapter were also presented at the meeting of the International

Relations section of the German Political Science Association (DVPW) in Munich,

October 2011 and at the International Studies Association Annual Meeting in San

Diego, April 2012, where we beneﬁted from the comments of Berthold Rittberger,

Thomas Gehring, and Alexander Thompson.

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34 Thomas Rixen and Lora Anne Viola

A Brief History of the G20 Institutional Dynamics (2008-2021)

Article

Jul 2022

Marina Larionova

The Group of 20 (G20) brought together leaders of the key advanced and emerging market countries to manage the 2007–08 financial and economic crises, reform the international architecture, devise a new global consensus, ensure recovery, and promote strong, sustainable, and balanced growth. Established as an anti-crisis mechanism and designated by its members as a premier forum for international economic cooperation, the G20 transformed into a global governance hub. Since its first summit, the G20 has generated high expectations and has become a subject of research and assessment for analysts, mass media, and the general public. Each summit’s deliberations, decisions, and engagements have been scrutinized. Critics of the G20 claim it has lost relevance and was not capable of responding to the degradation of multilateralism, or the COVID-19 pandemic and the crisis it induced. In this article, the logic of historical institutionalism is applied to explore the confluence of dynamics in the G20’s evolution: demand for G20 leadership; agenda expansion and institutionalization; and legitimation, accountability, and engagements. It is concluded that the G20 changed global governance trends, creating a more inclusive global governance that integrates the G20’s own extensive and diverse cooperation networks with the networks of the other international institutions and engagement groups involved in G20 policy processes. The networked governance, alongside the rotating presidency, the Troika, and various outreach mechanisms, augment the G20’s authority and reduce the legitimacy gap perception. The benefits from the early decisions, established and expanding agenda, patterns of engagement, cognitive scripts, embedded ideas, and internalized norms became strong endogenous sources of stability, reinforced in positive feedback loops. Despite tensions between members, the value that the G20 provides and the global public goods it generates, real and expected returns, constitute significant incentives for the G20’s continued engagement, sustain its evolving dynamics, and consolidate its path-dependency. The downside of the G20’s resilience is its inability to undertake innovative initiatives in the wake of COVID-19 or to provide the powerful leadership the world needed to overcome the pandemic and the related economic and social crises. Notwithstanding these failures, the G20 remains the crucial hub of contemporary global economic governance. However, the lock-in may entail the risk of losing relevance to other institutions.

The Importance of Taking Into Account the Results of Additive Modeling During Dynamics Process Analyzing

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Feb 2024

References

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Nov 2023

Christopher McIntosh

How can we better relate and respond to the political times we inhabit? Temporal relationships play a central role in the questions at the heart of global politics, but political commentators and observers focus almost exclusively on the past as a means of predicting and preparing for the future. Christopher McIntosh argues that, although past events are meaningful for our collective future, the present remains vitally important. McIntosh emphasises the importance of the present as a conceptual resource and analytical category for thinking about international politics. The present, he suggests, places an orientation toward difference and a recognition of the human limits of understanding alongside an emphasis on process and change. This book will shift current thinking about prediction and better enable the use of knowledge about international politics to meaningfully and positively intervene in present-day concerns.

Institutional Inertia and Change: Explaining the Czech and Portuguese Engagement in European Defence Market Integration

Article

Full-text available

Aug 2023

The Permanent Structured Cooperation in Defence (PESCO) and the European Defence Fund (EDF) constitute another attempt to consolidate the European defence market. In this article, we explain the different engagements of Czechia and Portugal in the two initiatives until 2021 through the evolution and reform of the domestic institutions governing their defence industrial policies. We trace how the institutions were established, how they contributed to the national position on PESCO and EDF and how the two countries' defence industries became involved. The article shows how the different institutionalisation of the defence sector allowed Portugal and its companies to participate more than their Czech counterparts. We contribute to historical institutionalist scholarship by evidencing the critical role of ideas in promoting and preventing policy change. We also offer an insight into the practice of European defence co‐operation and identify processes that challenge further integration.

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Chapter

Mar 2023

Nikki J. Teo

The United Nations in Global Tax Coordination fills the decade-long knowledge gap in international tax history concerning the UN Fiscal Commission, which functioned as the overarching fiscal authority during the early post-World War II economic order. With insights from political economy and international relations scholarship, this critical archival examination chronicles the tenacious activism by post-colonial developing countries to preserve source taxation rights, and by the UN Secretariat in championing the development of equitable tax rules. Such activism would ultimately lead developed countries to oust the UN as a forum for international tax norm setting. The book includes a revealing prehistory of the wartime work of the League of Nations that questions the legitimacy of the Mexico Model, the first model tax convention between developed and developing countries. This expertly researched work is essential reading for understanding the roles of politics, states, secretariats and private actors in directing global tax coordination.

Strukturanalyse von GG-Systemen

Chapter

Feb 2023

Georg Simonis

Das nachfolgende Kapitel beschäftigt sich mit der Analyse von Global-Governance-Systemen (GG-Systemen). Zu Beginn des ersten Unterkapitels wird definiert, was unter einem GG-System zu verstehen ist. Dabei rückt der problemlösende Charakter von GG-Systemen ins Zentrum. In diesem Zusammenhang werden auch die einzelnen Strukturelemente eines GG-Systems behandelt, um anschließend drei unterschiedliche Formen von GG-Systemen zu betrachten: GG-Systeme mit integrierter und mit speziellen Aufgaben betrauter IOs, GG-Systeme mit Sekretariaten, die über geringe delegierte Autonomie verfügen (Regimetyp) sowie GG-Systeme, die netzwerkförmig organisiert sind, wobei die Knotenpunkte häufig von privaten Akteuren (Organisationen) gebildet werden. Die Leistungsfähigkeit (Steuerungsfähigkeit) von GG-Systemen hängt von zahlreichen Faktoren ab, von denen für jeden GG-Typ die jeweils wichtigsten untersucht werden. Dabei sind Steuerungsdefizite von GG-Systemen vor dem Hintergrund der von ihnen zu bewältigenden Aufgaben zu beurteilen.

Politische Merkmale von GG-Systemen

Chapter

Feb 2023

Georg Simonis

Im Zentrum des nachfolgenden Kapitels stehen die für die Untersuchung von GG-Systemen basalen Konzepte von Legitimität und Macht. Dabei werden die beiden Konzepte aus jeweils unterschiedlichen Perspektiven analysiert. Global-Governance-Institutionen (GGIs) handeln in einem Konfliktfeld, das sich aus legitimatorischen und delegitimatorischen Komponenten speist. Es werden verschiedene Dimensionen von Macht untersucht, über die GG-Systeme verfügen. Beide Konzepte werden an Beispielen illustriert. Weitere analytische Merkmale von GG-Systemen sind deren Effektivität sowie deren Wandlungsfähigkeit. Bei der Analyse von GG-Systemen darf auch nicht die Perspektive von unten vergessen werden und die Beantwortung der Frage, welche Folgen Global Governance für Betroffene hat.

Bibliography

Article

May 2022

Michael W. Manulak

As wildfires rage, pollution thickens, and species disappear, the world confronts environmental crisis with a set of global institutions in urgent need of reform. Yet, these institutions have proved frustratingly resistant to change. Introducing the concept of Temporal Focal Points, Manulak shows how change occurs in world politics. By re-envisioning the role of timing and temporality in social relations, his analysis presents a new approach to understanding transformative phases in international cooperation. We may now be entering such a phase, he argues, and global actors must be ready to realize the opportunities presented. Charting the often colorful and intensely political history of change in global environmental politics, this book sheds new light on the actors and institutions that shape humanity's response to planetary decline. It will be of interest to scholars and advanced students of international relations, international organization and environmental politics and history.

ISTORIJSKI INSTITUCIONALIZAM - POTENCIJAL OBJAŠNJENJA UZROKA KRIZE HIPOTEKARNOG DUGA IZ 2007. GODINE U SJEDINJENIM AMERIČKIM DRŽAVAMA

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2020

Andrea Matijevic

Cilj ovog rada jeste da predstavi istorijski institucionalizam kao jedan od pristupa proučavanja uzroka krize hipotekarnog duga u SAD. Kao što će biti prikazano, za razliku od tradicionalnog pristupa koji ovu krizu smešta u ok- vire isključivo ekonomskih uzroka i interesa koji su opredelili ponašanja koja su dovela do uvećanja rizika po finansijski sistem SAD, istorijski institucionali- zam je pogodan jer omogućava da uzroke krize smestimo u političke okvire, odnosno da proučavamo krizu hipotekarnog duga kao posledicu ekonomskih poremećaja nastalih usled političkih odluka, odnosno usled izmena institucionalnog okvira SAD. Up- ravo zbog toga, rad tretira istorijski institucionalizam uporedno, predstavljajući njegove prednosti u odnosu na dominantan pristup uzrocima krize koji se može obja- sniti pretpostavkama teorije racionalnog izbora. Ovaj rad dakle predstavlja jednu studiju slučaja, koja nam praktično pokazuje potencijal istorijskog institucionali- zma da objasni delovanje institucija i dalekosežnost posledica takvog delovanja.

Developing influence: the power of ‘the rest’ in global tax governance

Article

Full-text available

May 2022

As Western-led institutions of global governance adapt to global power shifts, the question of which countries dominate, and how, increasingly animates scholarship. Yet while attention has shifted from ‘Great’ to ‘Rising’ Powers, the underlying focus on market power has changed little. In this article, we shift the focus to alternative forms of power that developing countries can wield in global governance, specifically in highly technical transnational negotiations. Reconceptualising the notion of ‘regulatory capacity’, we argue that states can overcome limited market power through socio-technical resources: expertise and professional networks. These resources form the basis through which policy claims become authoritative and they enable emerging state coalitions to influence policy-making. To demonstrate this, we analyse developing countries’ involvement in standard-setting for international corporate taxation. Specifically, we study the newly established G20/OECD Inclusive Framework, an experiment where more than 140 jurisdictions participate in negotiations that were previously the preserve of OECD states. Based on unique attendance data and interviews with dozens of participants, we perform a detailed analysis of specific policy decisions, interrogating the extent and sources of developing countries’ influence. We find that socio-technical resources allow individuals from lower-income countries to achieve narrow yet significant successes, punching above their weight in global governance. © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Networks of Influence? Developing Countries in a Networked Global Order

Article

May 2009

Networks are thriving in global politics. Some bring policy-makers from different countries together to share problems and to forge possible solutions, free from rules of representation, decision-making, and transparency which constrain more formal international organizations. This book asks whether developing countries can benefit from such networks? Or are they safer to conduct their international relations in formal institutions? The answer varies. The key lies in how the network is structured and what it sets out to achieve. This book presents a fascinating account of how some networks have strengthened the position of developing country officials, both at home, and in their international negotiations. Equally, it points to conditions which make it perilous for developing countries to rely on networks.

Brock Chisholm, the World Health Organization, and the Cold War

Book

Jan 2009

John Farley

Non-governmental Organizations

Chapter

Dec 2022

Louis Kriesberg

The IMF and Basic Needs Conditionality

Article

Dec 1982
J World Trade

Richard Gerster

Race and Historical International Relations

Chapter

Jun 2021

This chapter provides a reflection on race and Historical International Relations (IR). It draws from emerging scholarship on the intersections between race, history, and IR and interrogates histories of race in IR and politics. It discusses the importance of race as a lens to understand the development of the modern international state system as well as forming the basis for disciplinary inquiry in IR. This chapter then points to the ongoing discussions and methods used by scholars to recentre race in IR. Drawing from these discussions, it considers the racialization, colonization, and displacements of indigenous communities in North America, noting how intellectual displacements and the displacement of indigenous bodies were facilitated by the development of residential schools. Using this example, we highlight how analysing race can reveal the material and ideational legacies of colonialism, the false division between the domestic and international, and the centrality of race in the maintenance of the current global order and IR.

The Status Quo Crisis: Global Financial Governance After the 2008 Meltdown

Book

Jul 2014

Eric Helleiner

The Birth of Development: How the World Bank, Food and Agriculture Organization, and World Health Organization Changed the World, 1945-1965

Book

Jan 2006

Amy L. S. Staples

The Domestic Sources of Multilateral Preferences: Varieties of Capitalism in the European Community

Chapter

Aug 2001

Orfeo Fioretos

Applying the new economics of organization and relational theories of the firm to the problem of understanding cross‐national variation in the political economy, this volume elaborates a new understanding of the institutional differences that characterize the ‘varieties of capitalism’ found among the developed economies. Building on a distinction between ‘liberal market economies’ and ‘coordinated market economies’, it explores the impact of these variations on economic performance and many spheres of policy‐making, including macroeconomic policy, social policy, vocational training, legal decision‐making, and international economic negotiations. The volume examines the institutional complementarities across spheres of the political economy, including labour markets, markets for corporate finance, the system of skill formation, and inter‐firm collaboration on research and development that reinforce national equilibria and give rise to comparative institutional advantages, notably in the sphere of innovation where LMEs are better placed to sponsor radical innovation and CMEs to sponsor incremental innovation. By linking managerial strategy to national institutions, the volume builds a firm‐centred comparative political economy that can be used to assess the response of firms and governments to the pressures associated with globalization. Its new perspectives on the welfare state emphasize the role of business interests and of economic systems built on general or specific skills in the development of social policy. It explores the relationship between national legal systems, as well as systems of standards setting, and the political economy. The analysis has many implications for economic policy‐making, at national and international levels, in the global age.

Small Nations in an Open International Economy: The Converging Balance of State and Society in Switzerland and Austria

Chapter

Sep 1985

Peter Katzenstein

Until recently, dominant theoretical paradigms in the comparative social sciences did not highlight states as organizational structures or as potentially autonomous actors. Indeed, the term 'state' was rarely used. Current work, however, increasingly views the state as an agent which, although influenced by the society that surrounds it, also shapes social and political processes. The contributors to this volume, which includes some of the best recent interdisciplinary scholarship on states in relation to social structures, make use of theoretically engaged comparative and historical investigations to provide improved conceptualizations of states and how they operate. Each of the book's major parts presents a related set of analytical issues about modern states, which are explored in the context of a wide range of times and places, both contemporary and historical, and in developing and advanced-industrial nations. The first part examines state strategies in newly developing countries. The second part analyzes war making and state making in early modern Europe, and discusses states in relation to the post-World War II international economy. The third part pursues new insights into how states influence political cleavages and collective action. In the final chapter, the editors bring together the questions raised by the contributors and suggest tentative conclusions that emerge from an overview of all the articles. As a programmatic work that proposes new directions for the analysis of modern states, the volume will appeal to a wide range of teachers and students of political science, political economy, sociology, history, and anthropology.

Governing Risk, The IMF and Global Financial Crises

Article

Jan 2010

Manuela Moschella

Historical Institutionalism and International Relations: Explaining Institutional Development in World Politics

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