Institutional Path Dependence Research Articles

Informalizing childcare during the COVID-19 pandemic: Policy responses to childcare and their implications for working parents in Denmark, England and Germany

The closure of extra-familial childcare facilities by European governments in 2020 was an important part of interventions against the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. One consequence was that childcare was provided by parents at home, mainly by women. As a result, women mainly experienced financial and employment risks related to this “informalization” of childcare. The childcare policies of European welfare states differ in the extent to which they include measures to reduce the social risks related to informalization. Against this backdrop, this paper asks: How should one understand cross-national differences in childcare policies during the pandemic? We are also particularly interested in the effects of childcare policies on the social risks connected with the informalization of childcare and what these mean for the gendered division of paid work and care. Differences in childcare policies during the pandemic are commonly explained in terms of the path dependence of such policies. Using the theoretical approach of “care arrangement,” this article introduces a broader theoretical framework that considers the role of cultural and institutional factors for understanding the cross-national differences in childcare policies during the pandemic. We introduce the findings of a comparative empirical study of childcare policies in three European welfare states—Denmark, Germany and England—that represent different types of care arrangements. This paper uses policy and media documents, quantitative data on childcare and women’s employment, cultural ideas and secondary analysis of empirical studies. We find that governments did not per se respond to the pandemic based on institutional path dependence regarding childcare policies, while the integration of culture into the theoretical framework allows for a more comprehensive understanding.

Railway experts and the construction of national space(s) in post-imperial Southeast Europe: the case of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes/Yugoslavia

This article uses an interdisciplinary approach and concepts of path dependencies, legacies, mental maps and social spaces to analyse the role of railway experts in the process of construction of national space in interwar Southeast Europe on the example of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes/Yugoslavia as a case study. The spatial analysis of this case study is based on primary and secondary sources: archival material, contemporary journals and newspapers, and contemporary expert's studies. The article analyses the role of transport infrastructure and railway experts in the construction of Yugoslav transport and national space, claiming that the old infrastructure and institutional path dependencies prevented construction of it.

A Study of the Mechanisms of Path Dependency in Tourism Poverty Alleviation Based on Grounded Theory —Taking Guangxi as an example

ABSTRACT This study applies grounded theory to explore path dependency in tourism poverty alleviation and constructs a model of the mechanisms of path dependency in tourism poverty alleviation in China. We find that path dependency mainly manifests at the levels of the government, tourism enterprises, and residents living in poverty, and it can be classified into cognitive path dependency; economic path dependency; institutional path dependency and technical path dependency. This study also finds that the formation of path dependency in tourism poverty alleviation is a long-term process. Different types of path dependency may have different effects on tourism poverty alleviation performance. In the face of non-optimal path dependency that may exert negative impacts, we recommend breaking through path dependency to achieve path creation.

Conceptual politics and resilience-at-work in the European Union

AbstractInternational crises, most recently the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, often radically change our view of the world and our place within it. The European Union (EU) has been particularly impacted by these developments because these crises have accentuated some of its ontological and epistemological uncertainties and insecurities. While the EU’s resilience turn initiated by the EU Global Strategy of 2016 aimed at strengthening the EU’s ability to prepare and recover from external shocks and crises, since then, the concept of resilience has undergone a transformation. In recent years, we have seen the EU turning back in on itself and abandoning the radical aspects of resilience. Hence a paradox has emerged – the more complex the problems faced by the EU, the more it turns away from the logics of complexity present in the idea of resilience. In this article, we examine this conceptual shift through the lenses of concepts in action and the way these have reflected changes in the external context, but also power coalitions and institutional path dependencies. This argument will be explored by examining the recently adopted Strategic Compass and the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF).

Allowing mobility and preventing migration? The combination of entry and stay in immigration policies

Western democracies have an economic interest in admitting immigrants but at the same time they fear the political costs of doing so. A recurring idea to help reconcile this tension is to allow for temporary mobility of immigrants while restricting their permanent settlement. Trying to shed light on this matter, this article studies whether and when liberal democracies design immigration policies that prioritise (temporary) mobility over (permanent) migration. First, the underlying rationale of states for such a mobility preference is identified, before conceptualising the temporal design of immigration policies based on the combination of entry and stay regulations. Second, three theoretical explanations for the variation of countries’ mobility preference are developed: liberal constraints, institutional path-dependence and domestic politics. Third, a comparative analysis tests the arguments by studying the combination of entry and stay regulations in the immigration policies of 33 OECD countries between 1980 and 2010. The results confirm that most liberal democracies have a mobility preference in their immigration policies, but largely confined to labour migration and to a declining degree over the past decades. The temporal design of immigration policies is path-dependent on historical immigration regimes with a tendency towards a lower mobility preference the more countries become familiar with large-scale immigration.

Only game in town? the persistence of competitive authoritarian regimes in modern Turkey

ABSTRACT Why do so many regimes remain competitive authoritarian? This article argues that institutional path dependence explains the persistence of competitive authoritarian regimes in which electoral competition exists, but is unfair. The weakness of institutions regulating free and fair interparty competition, like multi-candidate elections, a constitution and statutes safeguarding fundamental rights, and intraparty competition, like intraparty democracy, is path-dependent and self-reinforcing. In settings where competition is partly free and fair, ruling elites have an incentive to combine democratic and undemocratic laws and policies to defeat counterelites and neutralize intraparty competitors. The likely long-term outcome is a vicious cycle of limited democratization, competitive authoritarian regime formation, and competitive authoritarian regime consolidation. I assess the argument by tracing the historical trajectory of reforms on constitutionalism, civil liberties, and multi-candidate competition in post-1950 Turkey, where the limits on interparty and intraparty competition have been reproduced in remarkable historical continuity.

Probit 9 in international trade: another case of institutional path dependence

Probit 9 in international trade: another case of institutional path dependence

Decoding climate adaptation governance: A sociotechnical perspective of U.S. airports

Inadequate governance is considered a major barrier for implementing policy, particularly those concerning global and complex challenges such as climate change adaptation. Literature in adaptation policy point to the lack of methods that monitor and assess how decision-making takes place and by whom. Based on a review of over 200 policy documents, this article benchmarks for the first time, the current airport climate adaptation regime in the United States and applies a sociotechnical system framework to scrutinize institutional capacity to address climate change impacts. An innovative policy review system is designed to decode how airport policies create conditions to use climate data as decision-relevant information and produce adaptation actions. Potential climate-cognizant policies are identified and characterized based on their target, timescale, and governance mode. Review results show that the assumption of climate stationarity is widespread. However, there is high potential for technical and, especially, organizational airport policies to incorporate climate science and adaptation pathways. Results also uncover governance barriers related to institutional path-dependence that include: (1) conflicting rationales between adaptation and reliability values, and (2) overpowering technical policies and market governance. These barriers perpetuate scale-mismatch between airport policies and expected impacts from climate change. Finally, we highlight the latent capacity for collaborative governance to advance adaptation regimes in airports and other multiscalar complex infrastructure systems. Our proposed methods and review results identify pathways to enhance institutional capacity for designing and operationalizing transformative adaptation policies.

Defining and operationalizing path dependency for the development and monitoring of adaptation pathways

Adaptation pathway approaches (APAs) have become an increasingly popular means of facilitating local and regional anticipatory planning under the influence of climate change. Many studies in this field of research identify path dependencies as a key barrier to adaptation efforts. However, their respective definitions of path dependency are often vague and impede a comprehensive integration of this concept into APAs. We fill this gap by systematically exploring the constituent characteristics and conditions of path dependency based on the original theoretical literature that emerged in the 1980s and early 2000s. We then propose an operationalization based on examples of flood risk management practice, and highlight ways in which APAs may contribute to revealing and anticipating technological and institutional path dependencies. This conceptual work serves as a comprehensive and systematic baseline for analyzing path dependency in empirical studies using APAs within and beyond the flood risk context.

Institutional persistence despite cultural change: a historical case study of the re-categorization of dogs in Germany

Human–animal relations in post-industrial societies are characterized by a system of cultural categories that distinguishes between different types of animals based on their function in human society, such as “farm animals” or “pets.” The system of cultural categories, and the allocation of animal species within this cultural classification system can change. Options for change include re-categorizing a specific animal species within the categorical system. The paper argues that attempts by political actors to adapt the institutional system to cultural change that calls for re-categorization of certain animal species can start a contradictory process that may lead to long-term survival of the respective institution despite the cultural change. It is common to explain the persistence of political institutions with institutional path dependency or policy preferences of the governing parties. This paper introduces a new institutional theoretical approach to the explanation, the approach of “rejecting changing a part for fear of undermining the whole.” This paper uses a case study of a series of failed political efforts to change the treatment of dogs in the framework of the agricultural human–animal policy in the Federal Republic of Germany in the second half of the twentieth century, to evaluate its theoretical argument, using analyses of historical political documents, mass media, and communication documents between civil society actors and policymakers. This paper makes an innovative contribution to the theory and research on institutional change, the sociology of agriculture and food, and the sociology of human–animal relations.

Agroforestry-Based Ecosystem Services: Reconciling Values of Humans and Nature in Sustainable Development

Agroforestry as active area of multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary research aims to bridge several artificial divides that have respectable historical roots but hinder progress toward sustainable development goals. These include: (1) The segregation of “forestry trees” and “agricultural crops”, ignoring the continuity in functional properties and functions; the farm-scale “Agroforestry-1” concept seeks to reconnect perennial and annual, woody and nonwoody plants across the forest–agriculture divide to markets for inputs and outputs. (2) The identification of agriculture with provisioning services and the assumed monopoly of forests on other ecosystem services (including hydrology, carbon storage, biodiversity conservation) in the landscape, challenged by the opportunity of “integrated” solutions at landscape scale as the “Agroforestry-2” concept explores. (3) The gaps among local knowledge of farmers/agroforesters as landscape managers, the contributions of social and ecological sciences, the path-dependency of forestry, environmental or agricultural institutions, and emerging policy responses to “issue attention cycles” in the public debate, as is the focus of the “Agroforestry-3” concept. Progress in understanding social–ecological–economic systems at the practitioners–science–policy interface requires that both instrumental and relational values of nature are appreciated, as they complement critical steps in progressing issue cycles at the three scales. A set of hypotheses can guide further research.

Discourses and practices of the smart city in Central Eastern Europe: insights from Hungary’s ‘big’ cities

ABSTRACT This paper intends to fill a gap in critical smart city scholarship regarding the Central Eastern European (CEE) context. To this end, smart city understandings and practices in Hungary’s five (non-capital) major cities are examined through a discourse-analytical focus on relevant municipal planning documents, existing interventions and key actors’ interpretations. The paper concludes that although smart city building in Hungary in many ways aligns with trends in the Global North and South, there are also notable differences that need to be contextualized in the country’s historically shaped trajectory of urban (policy) development, especially its post-socialist institutional path-dependencies.

National Security Policymaking in the Shadow of International Law

Scholars have long debated whether and how international law impacts governmental behavior, even in the absence of coercive sanction. But this literature does not sufficiently address the possible impact of international law in the area of national security policymaking. Yet, policies that the executive branch purports to adopt as a wholly discretionary matter may still be heavily influenced by international legal norms, regardless of whether or not those norms are formally recognized as legally binding. And those policies can be surprisingly resilient, even in subsequent administrations. Moreover, because they are only seen as discretionary policies, they may be more easily adopted than formal legal interpretations. For all of these reasons, the impact of international law on national security policymaking is a crucial unexplored area in the debate about the efficacy of international law. This Article describes how the norms and values embedded in international human rights law can sometimes be adopted, if not as a matter of formal law at the international level, then as a matter of official policy and practice. In addition, it surveys the advantages and disadvantages of such an approach, using two different Obama administration counterterrorism policies and Trump administration successor policies as case studies. Ultimately, I argue that the emergence and persistence of such policies is evidence of international law’s constraining impact. International law, it turns out, casts a long shadow as its paradigms get translated into policy. I also analyze the attributes of these policies, including their “legalistic” character and the consequences of creating policies of this type. This analysis suggests that importing international law paradigms into national security policymaking can be a pragmatic and effective alternative to formal international lawmaking, though it also may side-step the process of creating robust new international law rules. Therefore, it is a practice that executive branch officials from the United States and other countries, human rights organizations, and administrative, constitutional, and international law scholars should at least consider, while weighing both the pros and cons. In addition, the stickiness of such policymaking, even across administrations, illustrates the importance of institutional path dependence, the role of lawyers, the constraint of interoperability with key U.S. allies in multilateral military actions, and the way norms get embedded in government organizations.

The long march through the institutions: Emerging powers and the staffing of international organizations

How successful have emerging powers been at increasing their representation within the secretariats of international organizations (IOs)? We examine the representation of the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) in the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the United Nations (UN) System, including the UN Secretariat, over the last two decades. The analysis reveals four major findings. First, some redistribution of staff positions from established to emerging powers has taken place, but it has been relatively minor. Second, nationals from emerging powers are still strongly under-represented in international secretariats in comparison with those from established powers. Third, emerging powers’ representation at the IMF and WTO increased more than in the UN, where it actually declined. Fourth, there is strong variation between emerging powers: India appears to be the most successful emerging power in sending its nationals to the secretariats of IOs, Brazil’s and China’s records are mixed, and Russia has fared poorly. We interpret our findings in light of international relations theories and theories of institutional path dependence. The results suggest that staffing patterns are only loosely related to shifts in economic size and are subject to strong independent institutional dynamics.

Development paradigms in the institutional configuration of vocational education and training in Chile (1964-2005)

ABSTRACT Mainstream approaches in comparative education have paid more attention to trends in donors’ priorities than to policy processes in recipient countries, overlooking the agency of national governments in the institutional configuration of vocational education and training (VET) in developing contexts. Drawing on constructivist political economy and historical institutionalist frameworks, the paper analyses the role played by global development paradigms and ideas in the VET policy reforms adopted in Chile during the period between 1964 and 2005. The study shows how the selective adoption of international development ideas in Chile was mediated by the ideological orientation of national government administrations in each historical period. It also shows how the main goals of VET policies evolved as the economy tertiarised and the demand for education grew among lower social classes. Finally, the paper identifies the military dictatorship as a path-shaping moment in the institutional configuration of VET in Chile, as it was able to impose a radical transformation of the system from central planning to decentralised market competition. This profound transformation generated institutional path-dependencies that restricted the capacity of future democratic governments to reverse the market model in VET.

우리나라 지방자치단체 스포츠이벤트 유치･개최정책의 경로의존성 분석에 대한 연구

우리나라에서는 1986년 하계아시아드경기대회, 1988년 하계올림픽경기대회를 치루면서 스포츠이벤트 유치･개최정책에 대한 관심이 증가하였다. 2002년, 전국적으로 월드컵축구경기가 개최되었고 각 광역자치단체들도 지역차원하에서 스포츠이벤트를 개최하려는 정책적 노력을 보이고 있었다. 이와 같은 결정이 정치적으로 이루어지는 경우가 많았으며 많은 경제･사회적 효과가 발생한다고 하였다. 그리고 광역자치단체의 스포츠이벤트 정책결정과정이나 국고보조금 의존행태가 경로의존성 경향을 보여주고 있었다.<BR> 중앙정부에서는 국제행사의 유치･개최 등에 관한 규정을 제정하여 스포츠이벤트 유치･개최 정책에 대한 관리･감독을 강화하였다. 그러나 광역자치단체뿐만 아니라 기초자치단체에서도 스포츠이벤트를 유치･개최하려는 정책적 노력이 확대되고 있으며 다양한 정책결정자간의 상호작용으로 인해 지속적인 경로의존성 경향을 보이고 있다. 그러므로 스포츠이벤트 유치･개최정책에 대한 경로의존성을 탈피하기 위해서는 주민투표의 실시, 패널티부과, 경제적 효과에 대한 심사를 강화하는 것이 필요하다.

The urban politics of policy failure

ABSTRACT Growing attention to the urban politics of policy failure focuses on the ways in which policymaking is politicized before, during, and after moments of failure, and the effects of policy failure in urban political process. We argue three trends are apparent: (1) Policy failure is arelational process rather than an end state, emerging from long term interactions between political actors and governance institutions. (2) In urban politics the definitions of “failure” and “success” can be fluid, and rhetorically weaponized for political gain. (3) Policy failures can have generative effects after apolicy fails, for instance, by catalyzing funding or establishing institutional path dependencies. This collection contributes to urban geography by establishing avocabulary and set of analytical techniques for researching spatial aspects of policy failure. The authors in this special issue build an empirical and theoretical baseline for future research, illustrating diverse mechanisms and outcomes of urban policy failure.

The mobility network of scientists: analyzing temporal correlations in scientific careers

The mobility of scientists between different universities and countries is important to foster knowledge exchange. At the same time, the potential mobility is restricted by geographic and institutional constraints, which leads to temporal correlations in the career trajectories of scientists. To quantify this effect, we extract 3.5 million career trajectories of scientists from two large scale bibliographic data sets and analyze them applying a novel method of higher-order networks. We study the effect of temporal correlations at three different levels of aggregation, universities, cities and countries. We find strong evidence for such correlations for the top 100 universities, i.e. scientists move likely between specific institutions. These correlations also exist at the level of countries, but cannot be found for cities. Our results allow to draw conclusions about the institutional path dependence of scientific careers and the efficiency of mobility programs.

Explaining Rwanda's prioritisation of rural electrification over rural clean drinking water through institutional path dependency

The Tennessee Valley Authority and Rural Electrification Administration became the World Bank's template of choice for development projects. They remained so due to both institutional inertia within the World Bank and path dependent thinking of electrification as a means to economic growth. Consequently, electrification took the front seat for development projects worldwide, extending to rural areas, while water remains perceived as an amenity, rather than as economic infrastructure. This explains in part why the Government of Rwanda has prioritised rural electrification over rural clean drinking water in spite of recent evidence showing that rural electrification does not deliver growth in the Rwandan context.

In-transit cold treatment: a case of institutional path dependence

AbstractIn-transit cold treatment consists of exposing food commodities – generally fresh agricultural products – to temperatures approaching 0 °C for a variable number of days during shipping in purpose-equipped containers in order to manage the risks of quarantine contamination. In this paper, we show that in-transit cold treatment is frequently required in the international trade of apples potentially affected by Mediterranean fruit fly (Ceratitis Capitata), despite the existence of potentially less costly and equally effective alternative means of applying the same treatment, in particular ‘cold storage’. We then try to understand why these alternative methods do not emerge spontaneously or become more widespread. We suggest that technical aspects and their respective costs are not always the most important factors. Transaction costs may also come into play. In accordance with ‘institutional path dependence’ literature, we suggest that the negotiation costs a country has to bear in order to encourage its trading partners to adopt an alternative treatment are high enough for it to be preferable to continue using the current solution, despite its higher adoption cost.