Critical juncture theory
"[6] The idea that such discontinuous changes have a long-term impact stands in counterposition to (2) "presentist" explanations that only consider the possible causal effect of temporally proximate factors.
[12] Stephen Jay Gould writes that "Thomas Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions" was "the most overt and influential" scholarly work to make a "general critique of gradualism" in the twentieth century.
[13] Anthropologist Ernest Gellner proposed a neo-episodic model of change in 1964 that highlights the "step-like nature of history" and the "remarkable discontinuity" between different historical periods.
"[14] Sociologist Michael Mann adapted Gellner's idea of "'episodes' of major structural transformation" and called such episodes "power jumps.
"[15] Sociologist Seymour Lipset and political scientist Stein Rokkan introduced the idea of critical junctures and their long-term impact in the social sciences in 1967.
[20] Gould's model of punctuated equilibrium drew attention to episodic bursts of evolutionary change followed by periods of morphological stability.
Key ideas in critical junctures research were initially introduced in the 1960s and early 1970s by Seymour Lipset, Stein Rokkan, and Arthur Stinchcombe.
In turn, these big discontinuous changes could be seen as critical junctures because they generated social outcomes that subsequently remained "frozen" for extensive periods of time.
[29] The reproduction of legacies through self-replicating causal loops Arthur Stinchcombe (1968) filled a key gap in Lipset and Rokkan's model.
Stinchcombe elaborated the idea of historical causes (such as critical junctures) as a distinct kind of cause that generates a "self-replicating causal loop."
Punctuated equilibrium, path dependence, and institutions Paul A. David and W. Brian Arthur, two economists, introduced and elaborated the concept of path dependence, the idea that past events and decisions affect present options and that some outcomes can persist due to the operation of a self-reinforcing feedback loop.
Kathleen Thelen emphasizes more gradual, cumulative patterns of institutional evolution and holds that "the conceptual apparatus of path dependence may not always offer a realistic image of development.
"[38] On the other hand, path dependence, as conceptualized by Paul David is not deterministic and leaves room for policy shifts and institutional innovation.
Collier and Collier's Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the Labor Movement, and the Regime Dynamics in Latin America (1991) compares "eight Latin American countries to argue that labor-incorporation periods were critical junctures that set the countries on distinct paths of development that had major consequences for the crystallization of certain parties and party systems in the electoral arena.
He holds that the reason is that the initial patterns of colonization, the subsequent process of economic incorporation of the new colonies, and the wars of independence varies.
[70] Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson’s Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (2012) draws on the idea of critical junctures.
[71] A key thesis of this book is that, at critical junctures (such as the Glorious Revolution in 1688 in England), countries start to evolve along different paths.
[72] Critical juncture research typically contrasts an argument about the historical origins of some outcome to an explanation based in temporally proximate factors.
Within political science, Berntzen argues that research on critical junctures "has played an important role in comparative historical and other macro-comparative scholarship.
[85] Ruth Berins Collier and David Collier's Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the Labor Movement, and the Regime Dynamics in Latin America (1991) has been characterized by Giovanni Capoccia and R. Daniel Kelemen as a "landmark work" and by Kathleen Thelen as a "landmark study ... of regime transformation in Latin America.
"[89] Frank Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones's Agendas and Instability in American Politics (2009)[90] is credited with having "a massive impact in the study of public policy.
