Back to Heraclitus: What Contentious Politics Looks Like When Everything Is in Flux

Abstract

This article examines the Dynamics of Contention research program against the backdrop of political science’s emergent concern with institutions during the 1990s. By the time Charles Tilly had developed his mechanism-based explanatory framework for understanding contentious politics, the study of institutions had come to dominate political science. Although the contentious politics framework has some similarities with historical institutionalism, I argue that the two approaches are incompatible, precisely because of the latter’s focus on institutions. The contentious politics approach requires historicizing everything, including institutions, in such a way that anything analyzable becomes a process. Historical institutionalism relies on historical fixedness and some understanding of equilibrium, both of which Tilly came to reject for the study of contentious politics, in favor of open-ended political conflict and causal mechanisms as explanatory building blocks. To probe the tension between Tilly’s mechanism-based approach to understanding contentious politics and historical institutionalism, I conduct a close reading of two books that Tilly wrote using the contentious politics approach to explain matters of concern to historical institutionalists: European Revolutions, 1492–1992 on revolutions and Contention & Democracy in Europe, 1650–2000 on democratization.