HOW INSTITUTIONS EVOLVE

This essay explores the question of how formal institutions change. Despite the importance assigned by many scholars to the role of institutions in structuring political life, the issue of how these institutions are themselves shaped and reconfigured over time has not received the attention it is due. In the 1970s and 1980s, a good deal of comparative institutionalist work centered on comparative statics and was concerned with demonstrating the ways in which different institutional arrangements drove divergent political and policy outcomes (e.g., Katzenstein 1978). In addition, scholarship in the comparative historical tradition has yielded important insights into the genesis of divergent (usually national)…