Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

Despite the fact that critical junctures are frequently deployed in historical analyses, we lack an explicit causal logic for them. This article proposes a distinction between permissive and productive conditions in critical junctures. Permissive conditions are necessary conditions that mark the loosening of constraints on agency or contingency and thus provide the temporal bounds on critical junctures. Productive conditions, which can take various logical forms, act within the context of these permissive conditions to produce divergence. I develop these concepts in detail and use classic analyses that apply the concept to show the implications of this new framework for the scope conditions, case selection, and theoretical completeness of historical analysis, as well as for broader issues in historical analysis such as the relationships between crisis and outcome, and between stability and change.

Keywords

critical juncture causation historical analysis qualitative methods path dependence

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Abbott

(2001). Time matters: On theory and method. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Bennett

Elman

(2006). Complex causal relationships and case study methods: The example of path dependence. Political Analysis, 14, 250-267.

Bulmer-Thomas

(2003). The economic history of Latin America since independence. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Capoccia

Kelemen

R. D.

(2007). The study of critical junctures: Theory, narrative, and counterfactuals in historical institutionalism. World Politics, 59(3), 341-369.

Collier

R. B.

Collier

(1991). Shaping the political arena. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Downing

(1992). The military revolution and political change: Origins of democracy and autocracy in early modern Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Falleti

T. G.

Lynch

(2009). Context and causation in political analysis. Comparative Political Studies, 42(9), 1143-1166.

Geddes

(2003). Paradigms and sand castles: Theory building and research design in comparative politics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Goertz

(2006). Assessing the trivialness, relevance, and relative importance of necessary or sufficient conditions in social science. Studies in Comparative International Development, 41(2), 88-109.

10.

Goertz

Levy

(2007). Causal explanation, necessary conditions, and case studies. In Goertz

Levy

(Eds.), Explaining war and peace: Case studies and necessary condition counterfactuals (pp. 9-45). New York, NY: Routledge.

11.

Goertz

Mahoney

(2005). Two-level theories and fuzzy set analysis. Sociological Methods and Research, 33(4), 497-538.

12.

Mahoney

(2000). Path dependence in historical sociology. Theory and Society, 29(4), 507-548.

13.

Mahoney

Kimball

Koivu

(2009). The logic of historical explanation in the social sciences. Comparative Political Studies, 42(1), 114-146.

14.

Mahoney

Thelen

(Eds.). (2010). Explaining institutional change: Ambiguity, agency, and power. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

15.

McAdam

(1999). Political process and the development of Black insurgency, 1930–1970 (2nd ed.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

16.

O’Donnell

(1973). Modernization and bureaucratic authoritarianism. Berkeley: University of California Press.

17.

Pierson

(2004). Politics in time: History, institutions, and political analysis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

18.

Saylor

(2008). Windows of opportunity: Commodity booms, political coalitions, and state building in Latin America and Africa (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Virginia, Charlottesville.

19.

Skocpol

(1979). States and social revolutions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

20.

Slater

(2010). Ordering Power: Contentious Politics and Authoritarian Leviathans in Southeast Asia. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

21.

Slater

Simmons

(2010). Informative regress: Critical antecedents in comparative politics. Comparative Political Studies, 43(7), 886-917.

22.

Soifer

H. D.

(n.d.). Elite preferences, administrative institutions, and educational development during Peru’s República Aristocrática 1895–1919. In Centeno

Ferraro

(Eds.), Paper leviathans: Liberalism and state building in the Iberian world. Unpublished manuscript.

23.

Thorp

(1998). Progress, poverty, and exclusion: An economic history of Latin America in the twentieth century. Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank.

24.

Weyland

K. G.

(2002). The politics of market reform in fragile democracies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

25.

Yashar

D. J.

(1997). Demanding democracy: Reform and reaction in Costa Rica and Guatemala, 1870s–1950s. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

The Causal Logic of Critical Junctures

Abstract

Keywords

Get full access to this article

References