Do Institutions Produce Institutional Change? The New Historical Institutionalism and Analytic Innovations in the Theory of Change

Abstract

This essay discusses the problem of endogenous institutional change in the context of the new historical institutionalism. It reviews the critique of traditional theorizing on institutional change and offers a comparative analysis of innovative approaches to institutional change on the contemporary agenda of historical institutionalism in comparative political science. The analysis focuses on the logic underlying the conceptual and analytical transformations in the methodological debate of how to expand the explanatory capacity of traditional models by introducing institutional variables in them. We review quasi-parametric models, incremental change models and those models seeking to introduce the dynamic interaction between ideas and institutions. The key argument is that, over this decade, institutional change models, driven by the introduction of new concepts, new modes of theorizing, and new mechanisms of change, have undergone a remarkable analytical transformation. These innovations have allowed political scientists to deal with change endogenously.