Politicians often say “the time is not right” for certain innovations, without explaining why. Here I explore several possible explanations: coalition building, the “mood” of publics or other elites (at home or abroad), framing effects, sequential strategic manoeuvring, herd and copycat politics, and turn-taking. Saying “the time is not right” implies that there are external, immutable, objective obstacles to the innovation in question. In many of those cases, that implication is untrue—as becomes transparent in the course of “democratic breakthroughs,” which remove many of those constraining conditions and expand people's sense of the possible. “Democratic consolidation,” when it reaches premature closure, can sometimes allow those constraining conditions and blocking coalitions to regain ascendancy, as arrangements which were only ever intended as transitional get frozen in place, remaining “too long.”
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