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cited in Beissinger, Young 2002a: 21) understood as “an enduring intergenerational transfer
from the past to the present”. Institutions still transmit the norms, values, capacities and rou
tines they acquired in former times. Legacies are hence long term social phenomena and not
only transitional features that might be overcome soon.
Pierson (2000) explains path dependency based on economic theory with the concept of
increasing returns: the benefits of staying on the path increase while the cost of alternative
behavior rises. Changing the path becomes a less attractive option. Thelen (1999: 392 396)
argues that path dependency becomes effective by feedback mechanisms, which can be func
tional and distributional effects: The functional effects relate to the fact that “once a set of
institutions is in place, actors adapt their strategies in ways that reflect but also reinforce the
'logic' of the system” (Thelen 1999: 392). Distributional effects refer to the power asymmetries
that are reinforced by institutions. In this way, they marginalize other actors with respect to
political processes that would have an interest in alternative institutional arrangements.
Hence, even with the political will of the elite, certain policy changes may not succeed due
to path dependency and feedback effects:
“Specific organizations come and go, but emergent institutional forms will be 'isomorphic' with (i.e. compatible
with, resembling, and similar in logic to) existing ones because political actors extract causal designations from
the world around them and these cause-and-effect understandings inform their approaches to new problems (...).
This means that even when policy makers set out to redesign institutions, they are constrained in what they can
conceive of these embedded, cultural constraints” (Thelen 1999: 386).
These effects get reinforced, as reform policies in general are eager to establish new institutions
while rarely giving attention to the de institutionalization of old institutions. The latter thus are
not replaced but rather complemented by new ones (Lowndes 2005: 294).
Even more than those of the other two institutionalist schools in political science, con
cepts of HI concentrate on power relations and power asymmetries in order to analyze persis
tence or change of institutional patterns. Their genesis could also be described as the result of
conflicts about the distribution of benefits in a wide sense between actors. The reason for
the genesis of institutions is hence not only that they would perform a certain function but also
that they serve certain interests. This has important implications for analyzing institutions and
for questions on how to change them: The question is not only whether institutions are func
tional or beneficial in general, but also who benefits from them (Jones Luong 2002: 26). The
attitude of actors whose benefits are constricted or abolished by the new system and the inter
play of societal and political power groups have decisive effects on institutional change and
might foster or prevent path changes. Likewise, Thelen points to the fact that the persistence
of certain institutions despite changing institutional environments can be explained with politi
cal interests in their stability: “[t]he language of 'lock in' [in path dependency arguments] fre
quently obscures the fact that, because institutions are embedded in a context that is constantly
changing, stability far from being automatic may be sustained politically” (Thelen 1999:
396). Hence, it must be stressed that institutional continuity is not something static, but a dy
namic process of reproduction and adaptation (Streeck, Thelen 2005). This is a very important
aspect as the context of transformation (which we face in the two case studies of this study)
provides the potential of a critical juncture enabling a path change (see below) if it is not
used, one needs to ask who might have an interest in keeping the status quo.
The just mentioned critical juncture is seen as an option for switching the path, for fundamen
tal institutional change. Critical junctures are moments or periods when substantial change can
take place, mostly when several incidents (political processes in different policy fields, econom
ic crisis, military conflict) come together to make change possible. This point is rather weakly
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