CHAPTER III: CONTINUITY AND CHANGE—HISTORICAL INSTITUTIONAL
3.1 L ITERATURE R EVIEW ON H ISTORICAL I NSTITUTIONAL A NALYSIS
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Chapter III: Continuity and Change—Historical Institutional Analysis on
the British Commons
I have introduced the British commons as a historical case study in the previous chapter.
I also argued for a new tragedy on the commons—an institution that failed to response to internally conflicting and externally challenging factors which brought tragedy to all those whose livelihoods depended on it. It was not overgrazing of the pasture that caused the tragedy; communal institutions in place overcame problems of collective action, free riding and supervision, thus avoiding Hardin’s tragedy parody all together. But that was not the whole picture: while the commonfield system had certain “communal” arrangements in common, other regional institutional differences may have led to different interesting outcomes. How can we address and explain these differences? And how can this lend insight to our original research question—to find lessons from this historic case for modern day governance?
In this chapter, I tackle the problems of how the commons was considered to be a
“triumph”? What really caused its demise? These problems require a method to establish causal relations and view the British medieval commonfield system as an institution. First, I start from introducing the definition of institutions and the literature of historical institutionalism. Then I pinpoint important concepts for my research framework, and introduce the framework of this chapter. Third, I analyze historical data under this framework and uncover the causal relations. Last, I discuss the findings and their implications.
3.1 Literature Review on Historical Institutional Analysis
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Here I pose three questions and answer them one by one as a contour of the literature review on historical institutional analysis: (1) What are institutions? (2) What is historical institutionalism?
Hence, what are institutions? Hall and Taylor see institutions as “the formal or informal procedures, routines, norms and conventions embedded in the organizational structure of the polity or political economy”.139 John L. Campbell made an excellent brief summary of the definition of institutions (from a non-rational choice institutionalist standpoint):
“Institutions are the foundation of social life. They consist of formal and informal rules, monitoring and enforcement mechanisms, and systems of meaning that define the context within which individuals, corporations, labor unions, nation-states, and other organizations operate and interact with each other. Institutions are settlements born from struggle and bargaining. They reflect the resources and power of those who made them and, in turn, affect the distribution of resources and power in society. Once created, institutions are powerful external forces that help determine how people make sense of their world and act in it. They channel and regulate conflict and thus ensure stability in society.”140
His definition is quite extensive, acknowledging that in any society, it is the fundamental layering of social interaction; that formal as well as informal rules matter; that institutions reflect struggles among the people living in it; that power and material resources are important in influencing the making of institutions; that institutions restraint possible options of action; and that institutions increase behavior predictability.
A second question in order is: what is historical institutionalism? Historical institutionalism is a school of approach in “New Institutionalism”.141 There are a total of
139 Peter A. Hall and Rosemary C. R. Taylor, “Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms”, Political Studies, Vol. 44 (1996), pp. 936-957.
140 John L. Campbell. Institutional Change and Globalization. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 1.
141 See Paul DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell’s comparison of the “old” and “new” institutionalisms. Paul DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell. 1991. The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, Introduction.
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three school categorized by scholars: rational choice institutionalism, organizational/sociological institutionalism, and historical institutionalism. 142 Scholars believe that this waves of thinking origins from fields such as macrosolciology, social history, and cultural studies—fields that have never been dominated by behavioralism.143 A brief mentioning of the first two is needed for further justification and understanding.
Rational-choice institutionalists generally assume that actors “have a fixed set of preferences or tastes” and “behave entirely instrumentally so as to maximize the attainment of these preferences in a highly strategic manner”.144 They also recognize the importance of equilibrium change, view institutions as “coordinating mechanisms that sustain particular equilibria”145 or as “strategic equilibria—situations where no one sees an advantage in changing his or her behavior”146—and explain institutions’ self-enforcement as the result when “each player’s behavior is a best response”.147
Sociological/organizational institutionalists consider institutions much more broader that political scientists,148 focus on “noncodified, informal conventions and collective scripts that regulate human behavior”,149 and take a cultural approach on individual behavior which sees actors’ behavior being not fully strategic but bounded by their own worldview (thus becoming “satisfiers” and not “utility maximizes”). 150 Additionally, sociological/organizational institutionalists stress “codes of appropriateness”; view institutional reproduction as actors socialize and learn to follow the codes, or because they have taken it for granted that they escape conscious scrutiny; and see actors carry existing
142 Hall and Taylor, 1996; Campbell, 2004.
143 DiMaggio and Powell, 1991, p. 3.
144 Hall and Taylor, 1996, pp. 944-45.
145 Mahoney and Thelen, 2010, p. 6.
146 Campbell, 2004, p. 16.
147 Grief and Laitin, 2004, p. 633.
148 See Hall and Taylor, 1996.
149 Mahoney and Thelen, 2010, p. 5.
150 Hall and Taylor, 1996, p. 939.
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scripts on to new innovations in new institutions.151 They see change as a process of bricolage by which actors recombine the existing institutional principles and practices available in their repertoires.152 Also, actors tend to reproduce the same institutional logic across various domains and become “isomorphic” with existing organizations.153
Last but not the least, we come to grips with “historical institutionalism”. According to scholars, this approach borrows from political theory, structural-functionalism, and social history.154 According to Hall and Taylor, historical institutionalists see institutions somewhat like Campbell as “the formal or informal procedures, routines, norms and conventions embedded in organizational structure of the polity or political economy”.155 In terms of the structure-agent struggle, it tends to emphasize the structural; in terms of factors of change, it tends to assign “power” as the central role; in terms of micro-macro attention of scope, it tends to accentuate the relationship between institutions and the individual in broad.156 Most importantly, this approach emphasizes “path dependency” (stressing the structural explanations) as a main mechanism of explaining the continuity and persistency of institutions, even be it “unintended consequences” that were not the original function of the institution (not stressing the functional explanations).157 To explain change, the mechanism of “critical juncture” was applied to explain the sudden “breakdown” of the original arrangements. In other words, “critical juncture” is a “discontinuous model of change in which enduring historical pathways are periodically punctuated by moments of agency and choice”.158
Paul Pierson and Theda Skocpol assigned three features of the historical institutional approach: (1) it addresses big and substantive issues, (2) it takes time seriously, and (3) it
151 Mahoney and Thelen, 2010, p. 5.
152 Campbell, 2004, p. 184.
153 Mahoney and Thelen, 2010, p. 5.
154 Hall and Taylor, 1996, p. 937; DiMaggio and Powell, 1991, p. 3.
155 Hall and Taylor, 1996, p. 938.
156 Hall and Taylor, 1996, p. 938.
157 Hall and Taylor, 1996, pp. 937-938.
158 Mahoney and Thelen, 2010, p. 7.
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“analyze[s] macro contexts and hypothesize[s] about the combined effects of institutions and processes”.159 Mahoney and Thelen views historical institutionalism as emphasizing the explanation of persistency of institutional patterns and outcomes, mostly over long periods of time, seeing institutions as the “political legacies of concrete historical struggles”, embracing a “power-political” view of institutions with distributional effects, and explaining institutional persistence in terms of “increasing returns to power”.160 Additionally, as Ikenberry puts it, historical institutionalism allows for “causal complexity”—“that there are interactive lines of causation between the social and economic environment and institutional structures”, and that institutions do not determine policy outcome, but “constraint, channel, and bend the play of societal interests” and “shape the identity and goals of groups and individuals”.161
We can see here that scholars have an array of defining characteristics of what historical institutionalism is. Mahoney and Schensul, in an rather insightful yet introductory article
“Historical Context and Path Dependence”, summarized best the variations of different traits into six “components” which are disputed among scholars arguing “how history matters”: (1) the past affects the future; (2) initial conditions are causally important; (3) contingent events are causally important; (4) historical lock-in occurs (5) a self-reproducing sequence occurs; (6) a reactive sequence occurs.162 Mahoney and Schensul reviewed in brief the disputed points of argument from opposing sides with examples and gave their synthetical view of how the two sides can be integrated. While this discussion is interesting and worth mentioning, we have to first introduce two main broader concepts of historical institutionalism:
path-dependency and critical junctures. After the general explanations, we will be more able
159 Paul Pierson and Theda Skocpol, “Historical Institutionalism I Contemporary Political Science”, in Katznelson, Ira and Helen V. Milner eds., Political Science: The State of the Discipline (New York: Norton;
Washington, D.C.: American Political Science Association, 2002), pp 695-96.
160 Mahoney and Thelen, 2010, pp. 6-7.
161 G. John Ikenberry, History’s Heavy Hand: Institutions and the Politics of the State. Paper presented at conference on The New Institutionalism, University of Maryland, Oct. 14-15, pp. 10-11.
162 James Mahoney and Daniel Schensul, “Historical Context and Path Dependence”, in Robert E. Goodin and Charles Tilly eds., The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis (Oxford, England ; New York, USA:
Oxford University Press, 2006), p.457.
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to appreciate why the six above are “components” rather than individual and mutual exclusive traits.
Path-dependency is “the notion that the institutions that guide decision making reflect historical experience…”, or in other words, meaning that “once institutions have been established through complex struggles and bargaining among organized groups, they have a continuing effect on subsequent decision-making and institutional building episodes”.163 In other words, a decision made at time A will have an impact on (limiting or enabling) a later decision at time B, even when actors and contextual situations may not even be the same at the later time. Generally speaking, this concept involves all the components above, from 1 to 6, but some more obvious than others.
Critical juncture is the “crucial founding moments of institutional formation that send [entities/organizations] along broadly different developmental paths”;164 it is the “periods of contingency during which the usual constraints on action are lifted or eased, thus open[ing]
up opportunities for historic agent to alter the trajectory of development”;165 and it especially incorporates “issues of sequencing and timing into the analysis”.166 Simply put, it is a specific timeframe, given all the right sequences of timing of events, that a window of opportunity opens up to allow for a different developmental path apart from the old one which might have not able to be considered as an option before. Thus, this directly includes components 3 and 6. Others are also relevant, but depend on how one view and define “how history matters”.
Now we explain the six traits listed by Mahoney and Schensul.
(1) The past affects the future: this is simply saying that something that happened in the past
163 Campbell, 2004, p. 25.
164 Kathleen Thelen, "Historical Institutionalism in Corporative Politics", Annual Review of Political Science, Vol. 2 (1999), p. 387.
165 James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen, “A Theory of Gradual Institutional Change”, in Mahoney, James and Kathleen Thelen eds., Explaining Institutional Change (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 7.
166 Thelen, 1999, p. 388.
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will affect something at a later time point. The problem with this “minimalist” assertion is that it is too vague for research operation or analytical rigor. It could mean that any causal relationship might become a path dependent example. In short, scholars do not contest this point, but do agree that this insight alone is not enough.167
(2) Initial conditions are causally important: This is saying that the starting conditions at the beginning or even before the beginning of a sequence make a lot of difference to the following sequence of events. Opposing scholars argue that initial conditions are not
“casually efficacious” because it is the immediate corresponding events which follow that is important. Hence, the critical juncture, in which a particular option is selected from an array of possibilities, initiates a path dependent sequence (from “the immediate corresponding events”). This should be the center of focus and not the all-encompassing initial conditions. The synthesis view proposed by Mahoney and Schensul is that if the so called “initial conditions” can be seen as antecedent conditions that come before the main sequence and that initial conditions are only part of the causal factor, then the sequence would still start from the critical juncture and not the initial conditions. This would make initial conditions as one of the intermediate variables and not the independent variable.168 (3) Contingent events are causally important: Contingency conveys the unpredictable nature
of events. Scholars see contingency embodied in the concept of critical juncture in that an option was selected during the opening or “random happening” which cannot be predicted with any existing theory or framework. However, other scholars do not view contingency as an innate or necessary characteristic of path dependence. They criticize this view as putting too much weight in the role of “chance” to explain a path dependent sequence;
“important and systematic origins of institutional outcomes” cannot be explained as
167 Mahoney and Schensul, 2006, pp. 458-59.
168 Mahoney and Schensul, 2006, pp. 459-61.
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“accidental” side of the debate.169
(4) Historical lock-in occurs: The central idea is that actors find it increasingly impossible to escape from the present pathway once the course is set. This implies a causal determinism which the destiny of the course is highly determined by past events. This idea is illustrated by the famous “Polya urn” experiment in which early decisions have colossal effects on the end results and later decisions’ effects are hardly influential, emphasizing the lock-in characteristic.170 However, other scholars do not view historical lock-in as inherent to the concept of path dependence. They are skeptical of real lock-in trajectories and stress the possibility of sudden breakoffs or ruptures with past established patterns.
Thus, this brings clashes between critical juncture (sudden ruptures) and path dependence (historical lock-in). A middle ground is proposed by Thelen’s concept of
“layering”—outcomes gradually change slowly over time which marginally shifts the overall trajectory, but accumulates notable shifts after a long period of time. In her perspective, change and continuity are closely embedded together such that they “occur side by side”.171
(5) A self-reproducing sequence occurs: Self-reproducing sequences mean that a given direction is steadily reinforced and furthered over time. Scholars who view self-reproducing mechanisms as necessary for path dependence define path dependence as increasing returns. This contrasts with scholars who accept other kinds of path dependence, namely “reactive sequences” mentioned below. One other disagreement, a very important one indeed, is the mechanisms of self-reproduction. What drives the self-reinforcing forces behind path dependence or historical lock-in? Mahoney’s adaption
169 Mahoney and Schensul, 2006, p. 462.
170 “Polya urn” experiment starts with two balls in an urn. One ball is red and the other black. In each round, a ball is randomly selected, taken out then out back again alone with an extra ball of the same color. As the process goes alone, one color becomes increasingly dominant. After many rounds, the ratio of the two colors of balls becomes relatively stable.
171 Mahoney and Schensul, 2006, p. 465. See also Thelen, 1999; Thelen, 2003. “How Institutions Evolve:
Insights from Comparative Historical Analysis”, in James Mahoney and D. Rueschemeyer eds., Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 208-240.
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of Randall Collins’ theoretical framework into four mechanisms is worth mentioning:
utilitarian explanation, functional explanation, power explanation, and legitimation explanation. We will get back to these mechanisms later.172
(6) A reactive sequence occurs: This is a sequence that is non-reinforcing. According to Mahoney and Schensul, it is “marked by a tight coupling of events in which each event in the sequence is both a reaction to earlier occurrences and a cause of subsequent occurrences”.173 In other words, each event is dependent on the previous event to form the overall course or pathway. For example, event A causes event B, then event B causes event C, and so on until event Z is reached. While event A (initial variable) may maintain the direct causal relationship to event Z (final outcome) independently of events B to Y (intermediate variables), the literature so far has not stressed the initial variable as explicitly important. However, this definition does “often imply a deterministic chain of causation”.174 Opponents to reactive sequence criticize it as possible to encompass any causal relationship that is non-reinforcing; path dependence should be left only strictly to self-reproducing sequences.
Having understood better the essence of historical institutionalism, we can see that such an approach can lend many insights to our understanding of the world. In research application, this approach has been used especially in comparative political economy, origins of the state, and development of state policy, just to name a few.175
This brings an end to introductory review of my research approach. I will now turn to the specifics of using historical institutionalism: to pin point causal relationships.
172 Mahoney and Schensul, 2006, p. 465-67; James Mahoney, “Path Dependence in Historical Sociology”, Theory and Society, Vol. 29 (2000), pp. 517-526. See also Randall Collins, Four Sociological Traditions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
173 Mahoney and Schensul, 2006, p. 467.
174 Mahoney and Schensul, 2006, p. 468.
175 See for example, Peter J. Katzenstein ed., Between Power and Plenty: Foreign Economi Policies of
Advanced Industrial States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977); Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Thomas Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, U.K.; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
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