AusPSA 2021 Conference Paper: Diagrammatical Approaches to Operationalising Historical Institutionalism as a Method in Comparative Politics

Diagramming Path Dependent, Punctuated Equilibrium, and Critical Junctures in EV Policy

Diagrammatical Approaches to Operationalising Historical Institutionalism as a Method in Comparative Politics

This week, I presented a paper with Stephen Darlington from the ANU on our approach to diagramming historical institutionalism as a method of process tracing in comparative politics. The abstract and our presentation are provided below.

Abstract

Historical institutionalism is often regarded as the least rigorous and the more tautological of the ‘new institutionalisms’, but this reputation is undeserved. We argue that historical institutionalism, when viewed as a method for, rather than a theory of, examining institutional stasis and change, can provide a rigorous approach to process tracing that is useful in examining the impact of institutional legacies on contemporary political issues. Famous historical institutionalist scholars, including Kathleen Thelen, suggest that systematic approaches to comparative temporal analyses can help to overcome the shortcomings of the inductive method in comparative politics. While many comparative political studies adopt historical institutionalism as an approach to examining temporal sequencing, few studies specify how historical institutionalism is used as a method and even fewer do so explicitly. Borrowing from other disciplines that have a long history of using diagrams to explain changes to the status quo, this paper examines the benefits of adopting visual heuristics to operationalise historical institutionalism in comparative political studies. Benefits include a systematic approach to capturing past legacies that inform present choices, identifying key periods of stasis and change, and identifying the specific exogenous and endogenous pressures and tensions that result in critical junctures within a temporal sequence.