Different traditions of social and political analysis inevitably arrive at a core set of concerns
about transformational change (Huntington 1991), legacy effects, and the strong hand
of the past (North 1990). Can a society’s existing institutions be used to bring about
systematic change, including to the functioning of those same institutions, or once in
motion, must these powerful systems stick to a characteristic path? When such questions
concerning the roles of individuals and institutions have been raised by contemporary
social theory, they have tended to produce an unbridgeable divide between the micro
and macro worlds of social analysis. No amount of theorizing about structure and
agency, dialectics, or double hermeneutics has seemed capable of doing much more than
elegantly restating the problem. The important developments in rational-choice theory
and historical institutionalism have helped us identify the mechanics of path dependency,
or what we might call the properties of a dynamic inertia, but have made less progress
in explaining the conditions under which some form of fundamental change will occur.
Where important new research has taken place it has tended to re-frame the problem as
the new task of explaining gradual change (Mahoney and Thelen 2010) or of indentifying
slow moving casual processes (Pierson 2004). Without doubting the importance of speed
in this field, it is also necessary to ask about the conditions under which the scale of
change itself might also be significant. In this paper we will see how an account of such
transformation might be given, and some of the key mechanisms for anticipating when it
might be likely to occur are identified.
Two kinds of circuit-breaking phenomena have generally explained such accounts of
transformative change as we can find in the historical literature – external crises and
significant process of internal disruption such as social movements. While these explain
significant change in some societies, they also point to the long-term persistence of inertia
in others (Esping Andersen 1990; Finer 1997). There is a well recognized tendency for
accounts of political transformation to emphasize exogenous pressures and to show how
resistant are the endogenous traditions of societies embedded in their unique institutions.
This suggests that we have only a partial theory of institutional change and a mostly
defensive explanation of the role that public institutions play in its enactment.