Bringing Events Back In: Aspirations, Slack and Institutional Change

• In Event: Advances in Mixed Methodology

Abstract

Accounting for institutional change remains a subject of long-standing debate. The field of “historical institutionalism” has come to elaborate two main approaches: an older “punctuated equilibrium” approach to institutional change as episodic and triggered by exogenous shocks; and a more recent and ascendant “incrementalist” approach that focuses on individual agents’ construction of endogenous change via everyday, micro-level activities. While the former approach has long been criticized for being overly static and deterministic, more recent assessments of the latter suggest that it swings the pendulum too far in the opposite direction. Such criticisms note that the incrementalist approach eliminates important analytic distinctions between micro-level actions and “eventful” discontinuities, and often fails to specify structural influences over agents’ actions (Capoccia 2015, Hall 2016, van der Heijden and Kuhlmann 2017).

Given the strengths and weaknesses of the incrementalist approach, this paper proposes a “behavioral eventful” approach, which re-introduces the useful category of major “events” that motivate actors to deliberately seek institutional change. Our approach remedies some of the central shortcomings of the older punctuated equilibrium approach. It highlights actors’ “aspirations” and access to “slack” resources vehicles for agency in institutional change processes triggered by exogenous shocks (Cyert and March 1962). Using cases of industrial transformation in Mexico and Brazil, we specify how actors’ aspirations and slack can be observed ex ante, overcoming the over-determinism that bedeviled older punctuated equilibrium approaches and prevented integration of exogenous shocks into subsequent models of change.

The comparative industry-level analyses suggest that depending on their relationship to actors’ aspirations and slack resources, exogenous shocks can register locally as one of three different ascending categories of institutional change: “non-events,” “near-misses,” or fully-fledged “events.” The three categories introduce a dynamism to institutional change unrecognized by older punctuated equilibrium approaches. Whereas “non-events” and “near misses” elicit actions that hew more closely to the constructs found in the incrementalist framework, “events” prompt actors to fundamentally reconsider their aspirations and their institutional models for meeting them, and thus require a different analytic treatment. In this vein, we advance specifications for how structural elements meet together with local agents’ interpretations, establishing a means to predict the magnitude and scope of event-driven change. Our “behavioral eventful” approach to institutional change thus offers a way out of the “either/or” choice currently facing scholars of historical institutionalism, while helping to resolve persistent gaps and contradictions in contemporary theories of critical junctures and institutional change.

Authors

• Seth Pipkin, University of California, Irvine

• Alberto Jose Fuentes, Georgia Institute of Technology