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Explaining the determinants and processes of institutional change

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French Politics Aims and scope

Abstract

Institutions used to be treated as independent variables, explaining a number of political outcomes. Having identified sources of institutional stability, political science has made considerable progress in providing insights into the determinants and the mechanisms of institutional change in general and into change in political institutions in particular. This was made possible by the combined efforts of three fields of study: works on electoral system change, regime change and some accounts on policy change. Authors working on institutional reforms have tried to answer two broad questions: the ‘why’ (the triggers that might explain the use of reforms and their motives), and the ‘how’ (the processes that can explain the final outcome of reforms). The existing theoretical accounts have enabled to identify several sets of incentives and obstacles to change: political crisis and instability and the state of the pre-existing institutional system. Some incentives and barriers to change are exogenous to the political actors conducting the reforms, while others are the result of endogenous interactions of actors within the system. Moreover, the research in this field has confirmed the existence of several barriers to change, the role of complexity and uncertainty in explaining the final outcome of processes of institutional change, and the importance of taking into account the type of reform and process leading to reform and non-reform.

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Notes

  1. Duverger’s (1951)‘laws’ analyse the link between electoral systems and the format of party systems.

  2. Immergut was actually not talking of veto players, but of veto points, later defined by other authors as ‘areas of institutional vulnerability, that is, points in the policy process where the mobilization of opposition can thwart policy innovation’ (Steinmo and Thelen, 1992, p. 7).

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  1. Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Bordeaux and Sciences Po/LIEPP, 11 allée Ausone, Bordeaux, 33600 Pessac, France

    Camille Bedock

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Bedock, C. Explaining the determinants and processes of institutional change. Fr Polit 12, 357–374 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/fp.2014.21

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