The study of critical junctures: Theory, narrative, and counterfactuals in historical institutionalism

World Politics

Volumn 59, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 341-369

  Capoccia, Giovanni ^a   Kelemen, R Daniel ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD   (United Kingdom)

^b RUTGERS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY; INSTITUTIONAL FRAMEWORK; POLITICAL HISTORY; THEORETICAL STUDY;

EID: 35948989755     PISSN: 00438871     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0043887100020852     Document Type: Article

References (214)

1. Of course, this dual model of institutional development is not the only one used by historical institutionalists: important recent contributions have emphasized alternative causal models such as layering, conversion, and drift. See, for instance, Kathleen Thelen, "How Institutions Evolve," in James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, eds., Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003);
2. Eric Schickler, Disjointed Pluralism: Institutional Innovation and the Development of the U.S. Congress (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001);
3. and Jacob Hacker, "Privatizing Risk without Privatizing the Welfare State," American Political Science Review 98 (May 2004).
4. See also Kathleen Thelen, Union of Parts (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 21-24;
5. Kathleen Thelen and Sven Steinmo, "Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics," in Sven Steinmo et al., Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 16-18;
6. Douglass North, "Five Propositions about Institutional Change," in Jack Knight and Itai Sened, eds., Explaining Social Institutions (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 18.
7. These moments of fluidity are also referred to in the literature with terms such as "turning point," "crisis," and "unsettled times." We will use the term "critical juncture" throughout our analysis.
8. Paul Pierson, Politics in Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 135.
9. See also James Mahoney, "Path Dependent Explanations of Regime Change," Studies in Comparative and International Development 36, no. 1 (2001), 114.
10. See, for example, Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966);
11. Seymour M. Lipset and Stein Rokkan, "Cleavage Structures, Party Systems and Voter Alignments: An Introduction," in Lipset and Rokkan, eds., Party Systems and Voter Alignments (New York: Free Press, 1967);
12. Ruth Berins Collier and David Collier, Shaping the Political Arena (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991);
13. James Mahoney, The Legacies of Liberalism: Path Dependence and Political Regimes in Central America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).
14. For example, Collier and Collier (fn. 4), 27;
15. Mahoney (fn. 4), 7.
16. As discussed below, Mahoney (fn. 4) is a significant exception.
17. Pierson (fn. 3);
18. Scott Page, "Path Dependence," Quarterly Journal of Political Science 1, no. 1 (2006).
19. Counterfactual reasoning is essential in the construction of causal arguments in general; see Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba, Designing Social Inquiry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 77-80. However, the role of counterfactual analysis is enhanced in the critical juncture framework. The institutional fluidity during critical junctures expands the range of possible decisions for key actors and increases their potential impact, thus making counterfactual scenarios both more plausible empirically and more important heuristically.
20. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944), 4.
21. Lipset and Rokkan (fn. 4), 37-38. While Lipset and Rokkan say that the "variety of empirical party systems" can be reduced to a "set of ordered consequences of decisions and developments" at critical junctures, their analysis is couched in a largely structural language, leaving little place for more fine-grained analysis of political decision making and meaningful choices during critical junctures;
22. Lipset and Rokkan, 44.
23. Sidney Verba, "Sequences and Development," in Leonard Binder, James S. Coleman, Joseph LaPalombara, Lucian W. Pye, Sidney Verba, and Myron Weiner, Crises and Sequences in Political Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 308.
24. See Paul David, "Clio and the Economics of QWERTY" American Economic Review 75 (May 1985).
25. W. Brian Arthur, "Competing Technologies, Increasing Returns, and Lock-in by Historical Events," Economic Journal 99 (March 1989);
26. idem, Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994).
27. Paul Pierson, "Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics," American Political Science Review 94 (June 2000).
28. Niels Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould "Punctuated Equilibria: An Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism," in Thomas J. M. Schopf, ed., Models in Paleobiology (San Francisco: Freeman, Cooper, 1972);
29. and Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2002).
30. Steven Krasner, "Approaches to the State," Comparative Politics 16 (January 1984);
31. Carl Gans, "Punctuated Equilibria and Political Science," Politics and the Life Sciences 5 (February 1987);
32. Albert Somit and Steven Peterson, The Dynamics of Evolution: The Punctuated Equilibrium Debate in the Natural and Social Sciences (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992);
33. Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones, Agendas and Instability in American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993);
34. Peter Hall, "Policy Paradigms, Social Learning, and the State," Comparative Politics 25 (April 1993).
35. On national social welfare policy, see John Gal and David Bargal, "Critical Junctures, Labor Movements and the Development of Occupational Welfare in Israel," Social Problems 49, no. 3 (2002);
36. Bernard Ebbinghaus, "Can Path Dependence Explain Institutional Change?" Discussion paper no. 2 (Max-Planck-Institut, Cologne, March 2005);
37. Jacob Hacker, "The Historical Logic of National Health Insurance: Structure and Sequence in the Development of British, Canadian and US Medical Policy," Studies in American Political Development 12, no. 2 (1998);
38. and Julia Lynch, Age in the Welfare State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
39. On U.S. constitutional law, see Bruce Ackerman, We the People, vol. 1, Foundations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991);
40. idem, We the People, vol. 2, Transformations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998);
41. Walter Dean Burnham "Constitutional Moments and Punctuated Equilibria," Yale Law Journal 108, no. 8 (1999);
42. Jack Balkin and Sanford Levinson, "Understanding the Constitutional Revolution," Virginia Law Review 87, no. 6 (2001).
43. On EU law, see Francesca Bignami, "Creating European Rights: National Rights and Supranational Interests," Columbia Journal of European Law 11 (Spring 2005);
44. and on budgetary policy, see Brigid Laffan, "The Big Budgetary Bargains," Journal of European Public Policy 7, no. 5 (2000).
45. On labor unions, see Kathleen Thelen and Ikuo Kume, "The Rise of Non-market Training Regimes: Germany and Japan Compared," Journal of Japanese Studies 25, no. 1 (1999);
46. John Hogan, "Testing for a Critical Juncture: Change in the ICTU's Influence Over Public Policy in 1959," Irish Political Studies 20, no. 3 (2005);
47. Jan Erk, "Sub-state Nationalism and the Left-Right Divide: Critical Junctures and the Formation of Nationalist Labour Movements in Belgium," Nations and Nationalism 11, no. 4 (2005), 551.
48. On agenda setting in policy-making, see John Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies (Boston: Little, Brown, 1985);
49. Baumgartner and Jones (fn. 16);
50. James True, Bryan Jones, and Frank Baumgartner, "Punctuated Equilibrium Theory," in Paul Sabatier, ed., Theories of the Policy Process (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999), 175-202.
51. On devolution in the U.K., see Simon Bulmer and Martin Burch, "Organising for Europe: Whitehall, the British State and the European Union," Public Administration 76, no. 4 (2000).
52. On regulation of competition in product markets and banking, see Marie-Laure Djelic and Sigrid Quack, "Re-thinking Path Dependency: The Crooked Path of Institutional Change in Post-war Germany," in Glenn Morgan, Richard Whitley, and Eli Moen, eds., Changing Capitalism? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 137-66.
53. On regionalism in East Asia, see Kent Calder and Min Ye, "Regionalism and Critical Junctures: Explaining the 'Organization Gap' in Northeast Asia," Journal of East Asian Studies 4, no. 2 (2004).
54. On foreign policy, see John Ikenberry, "Conclusion," in John Ikenberry, David A. Lake, and Michael Mastanduno, eds., The State and American Foreign Economic Policy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), 219-43.
55. On comparative political economy, see Peter Gourevitch, Politics in Hard Times (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), 239;
56. and T. J. Pempel, Regime Shift: Comparative Dynamics of the Japanese Political Economy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), 1-3.
57. On the modern state, see Krasner (fn. 16);
58. and Thomas Ertman, The Birth of the Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
59. On the causes of war, see Jack Levy and Gary Goertz, eds., "Causal Explanations, Necessary Conditions, and Case Studies: World War I and the End of the Cold War" (Manuscript, 2005), 26-27.
60. On the end of the cold war, see Richard Herrmann and Richard Ned Lebow, eds., Ending the Cold War (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2004), 10.
61. For macrohistorical analyses of the development of regimes or entire regions, see Collier and Collier (fn. 4);
62. Gregory Luebbert, Liberalism, Fascism, or Social Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991);
63. Mahoney (fin. 4);
64. Robert Putnam, Making Democracy Work (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 179-81;
65. Terry Karl, The Paradox of Plenty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997);
66. Pauline Jones-Luong, Institutional Change and Political Continuity in Post-Soviet Central Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 257ff.;
67. and Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan, 320-21.
68. Pierson (fn. 14).
69. Collier and Collier (fn. 4), 29.
70. See also Dan Slater and Erica Simmons, "Informative Regress: Critical Antecedents and Historical Causation" (Paper prepared for presentation at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, August 2007).
71. Mahoney (fn. 4).
72. James Mahoney, "Path Dependence in Historical Sociology," Theory and Society 29 (August 2000), 513;
73. and Mahoney (fn. 3), 113.
74. Mahoney (fn. 4), 7.
75. For an analysis that emphasizes the heightened significance of individual actors and their decisions during moments of crisis when "system creating choices are made," see also Gourevitch (fn, 17), 239.
76. See also Ira Katznelson, "Periodization and Preferences," in James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, eds., Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 270-303.
77. Ebbinghaus (fn. 17);
78. and Hogan (fn. 17);
79. idem, "Remoulding the Critical Junctures Approach," Canadian Journal of Political Science 39, no 3 (2006).
80. A notable exception to this rule is Pierson (fn. 3), whose work we discuss below.
81. For example, Collier and Collier (fn. 4);
82. and Andrew Abbott, Time Matters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
83. Abbott (fn. 25).
84. For example, see Gould (fn. 15).
85. Philip Ball, Critical Mass (London: Arrow, 2004).
86. See, for example, Avner Greif and David Laitin, "A Theory of Endogenous Institutional Change," American Political Science Review 98 (November 2004), 640.
87. Ebbinghaus (fn. 17), 16.
88. Ann Swidler, "Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies," American Sociological Review 51, no. 2 (1986);
89. and Katznelson (fn. 22).
90. Wolfgang Streeck and Kathleen Thelen, "Introduction: Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies," in Streeck and Thelen, eds., Beyond Continuity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 8-9.
91. Stephen Skowronek, "Order and Change," Polity 28, no. 1 (1995), 95;
92. see also Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, "Beyond the Iconography of Order," in Lawrence C. Dodd and Calvin Jillson, eds., The Dynamics of American Politics (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1994), 321;
93. Julia Lynch and Tulia Falleti, "Context and Causal Homogeneity in Historical Research" (Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, September 2006).
94. Andrew Cortell and Susan Peterson, "Altered States: Explaining Domestic Institutional Change," British Journal of Political Science 29 (January 1999), 187.
95. Thelen (fn. 1), 213;
96. see also Michael Shermer, "Exorcising Laplace's Demon," History and Theory 34, no. 1 (1995), 71.
97. Some scholars employ the expression "moments," which, even when used in a metaphorical sense, maybe misleading.
98. In the literature on evolution, from which much of the social science literature on institutional evolution draws inspiration, scholars who reject the notion of punctuated equilibrium emphasize precisely this point; see, for example, Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: Norton, 1996).
99. Pierson (fin. 3), 92ff.
100. For encompassing typologies of models of institutional change, see Streeck and Thelen (fn. 32);
101. Pierson (fn. 3), 134-66;
102. Kathleen Thelen, "Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics," Annual Review of Political Science 2 (1999);
103. idem (fn. 1);
104. idem, How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004);
105. Hacker (fn. 1);
106. and B. Guy Peters, Jon Pierre, and Desmond S. King, "The Politics of Path Dependency: Political Conflict in Historical Institutionalism," Journal of Politics 67, no. 4 (2005).
107. Though Pierson also categorizes causal processes in terms of the time horizon of their outcome, he recognizes that this is problematic in cases where there is a temporal separation between the cause (which takes place in the critical juncture) and the effect (which takes place at the end of the path-dependent process); see Pierson (fn. 3), 95. The distinction between the effect (outcome) to be explained and the path-dependent process that generates it is a matter of conceptualization of the effect itself and depends on the specific research question.
108. See, for example, Collier and Collier (fn. 4), 29-30;
109. Abbott (fn. 25);
110. Gal and Bargal (fn. 17), 437;
111. Hogan (fn. 17).
112. Pierson (fn. 14).
113. King et al. (fn. 8), 128-37;
114. and Barbara Geddes, Paradigms and Sand Castles (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003).
115. See also David Collier and James Mahoney, "Insights and Pitfalls: Selection Bias in Qualitative Research," World Politics 49 (October 1996).
116. Giovanni Capoccia, Defending Democracy: Reactions to Extremism in Interwar Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).
117. Arthur (fn. 13, 1994);
118. David (fn. 12);
119. and Douglass North, Institutions, Institutional Cbange and Economic Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
120. Collier and Collier (fn. 4), 27;
121. Mahoney (fn. 4), 7.
122. Arthur (fn. 13, 1994), 14.
123. Paul David, "Path Dependence, Its Critics and the Quest for 'Historical Economics'" (Manuscript, Oxford and Stanford, 2000), 10.
124. See, for instance, Moe's work adapting principal-agent theory to the world of politics; Terry Moe, "The New Economics of Organization," American Journal of Political Science 28 (November 1984).
125. See, for example, Peter Hall and Rosemary Taylor, "Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms," Political Studies 44 (December 1996);
126. Luebbert (fn. 17), 312;
127. John Keeler, "Opening the Window for Reform: Mandates, Crises and Extraordinary Policy-Making," Comparative Political Studies 25 (January 1993), 434, 477-80;
128. Cortell and Peterson (fn. 34), 187-89;
129. Geoffrey Garrett and Peter Lange, "Internationalization, Institutions and Political Change," International Organization 49 (Fall 1995), 629-31;
130. and Jones-Luong (fn. 17),276ff. We do not mean to suggest that accidental concatenations of unrelated, contingent, events - so-called Cournot effects - cannot play an important role in influencing the outcome of a critical juncture;
131. see Pierson (fn. 3), 57. Events can obviously play an important role in influencing decisions and their consequences. What counts as "contingent" and "unrelated," however, depends on the theoretical framework adopted.
132. Thelen and Steinmo (fn. 1), 17.
133. Peter Kincaid, The Rule of the Road (Westport: Greenwood, 1991), 2-41.
134. Alexander George, "Case Studies and Theory Development: The Method of Structured, Focused Comparison," in P. G. Lauren, ed., Diplomacy: New Approaches in History, Theory and Policy (New York: Free Press, 1979);
135. Alexander George and Timothy McKeown, "Case Studies and Theories of Organizational Decision-Making," in Robert Coulam and Richard Smith, eds., Advances in Information Processing in Organizations, vol. 2 (Greenwich: JAI Press, 1985);
136. Alexander George and Andrew Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development (Boston: MIT Press, 2005).
137. Peter Hall, "Aligning Ontology and Methodology in Comparative Politics," in James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, eds., Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 330-59;
138. and idem, "Systematic Process Analysis: When and How to Use It," European Management Review, 3, no. 1 (2006), 24-31.
139. Robert H. Bates, Avner Greif, Margaret Levi, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, and Barry R. Weingast, Analytic Narratives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998);
140. Margaret Levi, "Producing an Analytic Narrative," in John R. Bowen and Roger Petersen, eds., Critical Comparison in Politics and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999);
141. and idem, "Modeling Complex Historical Processes with Analytic Narratives," in Ian Shapiro, Rogers M. Smith, and Tarek E. Masoud, eds., Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
142. Isaiah Berlin, "Historic Inevitability," in Patrick Gardiner, ed., The Philosophy of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 176.
143. A "foresight" perspective is obviously necessary to identify correctly those critical junctures that did not in the end lead to change.
144. Johannes Bulhof, "What If? Modality and History," History and Theory 38, no. 2 (1999);
145. Martin Bunzl, "Counterfactual History: A User's Guide," American Historical Review 109, no. 3 (2004).
146. James D. Fearon, "Counterfactuals and Hypothesis Testing in Political Science," World Politics 43 (January 1991);
147. Ellen Immergut, "Historical Institutionalism in Political Science and the Problem of Change," in Andreas Wimmer and Reinhart Kössler, eds., Understanding Change (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005);
148. Richard Ned Lebow, "What's So Different about a Counterfactual?" World Politics 52 (July 2000);
149. Amartya Sen, Rationality and Freedom (New Dehli and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002);
150. and Philip Tetlock and Aaron Belkin, "Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics: Logical, Methodological, and Psychological Perspectives," in Tetlock and Belkin, eds., Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 1-38; interview with Adam Przeworski, "Adam Przeworski: Capitalism, Democracy, and Science," in Gerardo L. Munck and Richard Snyder, eds., Passion, Craft, and Method in Comparative Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 479.
151. As mentioned above, our reference to counterfactual analysis here is more specific than simply considering them as a necessary logical part of a causal argument; see King et al. (fn. 8), 88-89. In the critical juncture framework, it is possible to reconstruct plausible counterfactual scenarios that could have had a large causal effect on outcomes.
152. Mahoney (fn. 21), 513;
153. and James Mahoney and Gary Goertz, "The Possibility Principle," American Political Science Review 98 (November 2004).
154. Tetlock and Belkin (fn. 59), 23-24.
155. Mahoney (fn. 21), 513.
156. See Lebow (fn. 59), 559;
157. and Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., "Human Agency and Impersonal Determinants in Historical Causation," History and Theory 38, no. 3 (1999), 300-306. As Turner points out, reducing history to impersonal causes gives rise to "a deterministic version of the past that lends a spurious air of high probability to what happened and blots out the effects of contingency that spring from immediate circumstances and individual choices" (p. 305). Lebow (fn. 59) argues that affected by this "certainty or hindsight bias," structural explanations "fail to recognize the uncertainty under which actors operated and the possibility that they could have made different choices that might have led to different outcomes" (p. 559).
158. See also William H. Sewell, "A Theory of Structure: Duality Agency, and Transformation," American Journal of Sociology 98, no. 1 (1992), 2.
159. See, for example, Richard Ned Lebow, "Contingency, Catalysts, and International System Change," Political Science Quarterly 115, no. 4 (2000).
160. Polanyi (fn. 9);
161. see also Turner (fn. 64), 302.
162. Tim Büthe, "Taking Temporality Seriously," American Political Science Review 96 (September 2002), 483.
163. See Barry Weingast, "Off-the-Path Behaviour," in Tetlock and Belkin (fn. 59), 230-45.
164. See also Daniel Carpenter "What Is the Marginal Value of Analytic Narratives?" Social Science History 24, no. 4 (2000). In his critique of the "analytic narratives" approach, Carpenter maintains that making explicit the counterfactuals by applying formal methods to historical accounts is of no value added, since it specifies only some of the possible (potentially infinite) counterfactuals. Carpenter misses the distinction between plausible and nonplausible counterfactuals. While game-theoretic modeling might not make explicit all the possible counterfactuals, it can clarify the most plausible ones and exclude others as nonplausible.
165. John Ferejohn, "Rationality and Interpretation: Parliamentary Elections in Early Stuart England," in Kirsten Renwick Monroe, ed., The Economic Approach to Politics (New York: Harper, 1991);
166. Avner Greif, "Self-Enforcing Political Systems and Economic Growth," in Bates et al. (fn. 55);
167. idem, Institutions and the Path to Modern Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
168. This is one of the main points in critiques of Analytic Narratives, see Jon Elster, "Rational Choice History" American Political Science Review 94 (September 2000);
169. or the symposium in Social Science History 24, no. 4 (2000).
170. Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, eds., The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).
171. George and McKeown (fn. 53);
172. and George and Bennett (fn. 53), 205-38.
173. It should be noted that process tracing is not incompatible with the use of formal methods and rational choices analysis; see George and Bennett (fn. 53), 205-32.
174. Giovanni Sartori, "Comparing and Miscomparing," Journal of Theoretical Politics 3, no. 3 (1991).
175. Büthe (fn. 67).
176. Stathis Kalyvas, The Rise of Christian Democracy in Europe (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996).
177. Capoccia (fn. 44).
178. Nancy Bermeo, "Democracy and the Lessons of Dictatorship," Comparative Politics 24 (April 1992).
179. Büthe (fn. 67).
180. The significance of such learning effects is evident in the rapidly growing literature on policy diffusion. For a recent review, see Beth Simmons, Geoffrey Garrett, and Frank Dobbin, "Introduction: The International Diffusion of Liberalism," International Organization 60, no. 4 (2006).
181. See, for example, Mahoney (fn. 4), 26-27. Mahoney remarks on Yashar's interpretation of regime development in Costa Rica and Guatemala; Deborah J. Yashar, Demanding Democracy (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1997). Lynchs (fn. 17) work on the development of pension systems in Italy and the Netherlands includes the analysis of two different critical junctures in each country.
182. One must consider the lowest probability of the outcome during rather than simply immediately prior to the critical juncture exactly because not all critical junctures result in change: considering only the probability before and after the juncture would lead analysts to ignore the criticalness of critical junctures that result in re-equilibration of the pre - critical juncture status quo.
183. y ≤0, then CJ was not a critical juncture with respect to outcome Y.
184. x) in order to discount the effect of time. Otherwise, critical junctures occurring in the distant past would produce the highest criticalness measures, even if they had a very modest impact on the probability of the outcome.
185. In arguments built on increasing returns and path dependence, the probability of the outcome of interest at the beginning of the path cannot equal 1, as this would deny the very logic of self-reinforcing mechanisms. Our formula captures this idea, in that if the outcome of interest happens immediately after the end of the critical juncture, the "temporal leverage" fraction would have a numerator of 0 and taking the natural log would give a result of negative infinity, rendering the CJ score meaningless.
186. While historical arguments relied on assessments of the likelihood of various outcomes, it is obviously problematic to assign precise probabilities to predictions in historical explanations; see Max Weber, Methodology in the Social Sciences, ed. and trans. Edward Shils and Henry A. Finch (New York: Free Press, 1949), 183.
187. The actual duration of a critical juncture obviously depends on the object of the analysis. Collier and Collier's critical junctures lasted between nine and twenty-three years; see Collier and Collier (fn. 4), 32. In Ackerman's theory of American constitutional development, the critical junctures, or "constitutional moments," lasted up to a decade; see Ackerman (fn. 17). See also Daniel Ziblatt, Structuring the State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). Ziblatt identifies "national critical junctures" in Italy and Germany, leading up to national unification, in "the decisive years of the late 1850s and 1860s" (p. 24).
188. Ziblatt (fn. 87).
189. Linz and Stepan (fn. 71);
190. Giovanni Capoccia, "Defending Democracy: Strategies of Reaction to Extremism in Inter-War Europe," European Journal of Political Research 39, no. 4 (2001);
191. and idem (fn. 44).
192. Henry Ashby Turner, Hitler's Thirty Days to Power (Reading, Mass.: Perseus, 1996).
193. Listing the key players, Turner (fn. 90) maintains that "it was one of these frequent junctures in human affairs when the fates of many rested with very few" (p. 166).
194. If this were true, then there would be very little "critical" in the events of January 1933 in Germany: structural conditions would create formidable organized interests that would then impose certain courses of action on whoever happened to be in positions of power in an ostensibly critical phase.
195. Turner (fn. 90), 168.
196. Joseph H. Weiler, "The Transformation of Europe," Yale Law Journal 100 (1991);
197. Karen Alter, stablishing the Supremacy of European Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001);
198. and Alec Stone Sweet, The Judicial Construction of Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
199. Balkin and Levinson (fn. 17).
200. Article 177 gives all national courts the option of making references to the ECJ in cases hinging on EU law and obliges final courts of appeal to do so.
201. Robert Keohane, Andrew Moravcsik, and Anne-Marie Slaughter, "Legalized Dispute Resolution," International Organization 54, no. 3 (2000), 483.
202. Alec Stone Sweet, Governing with Judges (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000);
203. Alter (fn.94);
204. and Karen Alter, "Private Litigants and the New International Courts," Comparative Political Studies 39 (February 2006).
205. Anne-Marie Burley and Walter Mattli, "Europe before the Court," International Organization 47 (1993);
206. and Alter (fn. 94).
207. Stone Sweet (fn. 98).
208. Alter (fn. 94).
209. Direct effect (Van Genden Loos, Case 26/62, [1963] ECR 1) provides that EU law creates rights for individuals that they can rely on directly within their national legal systems, whereas supremacy ( Costa v ENEL, Case 6/64, [1964] ECR 585) holds that EU law takes primacy over conflicting national laws.
210. Stone Sweet (fn. 98);
211. and Alter (fn. 94).
212. Thelen (fn. 1);
213. and Streeck and Thelen (fn. 32).
214. Pierson (fn. 14), 264.