Explaining Institutional Change

James Mahoney is a Professor of Political Science and sociology at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Legacies of Liberalism: Path Dependence and Political Regimes in Central America (2001), which received the Barrington Moore Jr. Prize of the Comparative and Historical Section of the American Sociological Association. He is also coeditor of Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences (Cambridge, 2003), which received the Giovanni Sartori Book Award of the Qualitative Methods Section of the American Political Science Association. His most recent book is Colonialism and Postcolonial Development: Spanish America in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge, 2010). Kathleen Thelen is Ford Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She also holds appointments at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Germany and at Oxford University, and she is an elected member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. She is the author, most recently, of How Institutions Evolve (Cambridge University Press, 2004), co-winner of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award of the American Political Science Association, and winner of the Mattei Dogan Award of the Society for Comparative Research. She has served as Chair of the Council for European Studies (Columbia University), as President of the Politics and History Section of the American Political Science Association, and as President of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics.

• 1. A theory of gradual institutional change James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen; 2. Infiltrating the state: the evolution of health care reforms in Brazil, 1964–88 Tulia G. Falleti; 3. The contradictory potential of institutions: the rise and decline of land documentation in Kenya Ato Kwamena Onoma; 4. Policymaking as political constraint: institutional development in the US social security program Alan M. Jacobs; 5. Altering authoritarianism: institutional complexity and autocratic agency in Indonesia Dan Slater; 6. Rethinking rules: creativity and constraint in the house of representatives Adam Sheingate; 7. Historical institutionalism in rationalist and sociological perspective Peter A. Hall.

'Explaining Institutional Change is, simply put, the best guide available to the incremental processes of institutional change that characterize so much of social and political life. Mahoney and Thelen have not only assembled an impressive and illuminating collection of essays showing how and why institutional change plays out as it does in a range of important domains (including a reflection on the field by Peter Hall that would make the book worth having even if it were the only chapter). With their own powerful synthesis of theories of incremental institutional change, they also break important new ground in institutional analysis.' Jacob S. Hacker, Yale University