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60 World Pol. 281 (2007-2008)
Toward a New Theory of Institutional Change

handle is hein.journals/wpot60 and id is 303 raw text is: TOWARD A NEW THEORY OF INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE By KURT WEYLAND* THERE has been a great disjuncture between political science and political reality in the last two decades. Whereas many political scientists have embraced institutionalism, highlighting the stability and persistence of political patterns and stressing the inertial forces in institutional change, the political world has simultaneously expe- rienced waves of profound transformation and stunning changes of trajectory-the advance of democracy, the fall of communism, and the adoption of market reforms in large numbers of countries. Few if any of these striking departures were foreseen by political science.' This weak record suggests the need to rethink institutionalist approaches, whose static and linear assumptions make it difficult to account for profound political change. The revival of institutionalism has certainly spawned a host of fruit- fil efforts to analyze the creation, maintenance, and change of institu- tions, a growing interest that has produced many important scholarly contributions. But institutionalism also suffers from significant limita- tions. While coming in different versions,2 it derives primarily from static and linear premises. Institutionalism has emphasized inertia and persistence and conceptualized institutional change as a more or less steady path along a predefined trajectory. To the extent that institu- tions matter, they by their nature exert stickiness and guarantee some * I thank Isabela Mares for suggesting that I generalize from my earlier work and write this article. I am grateful to Catherine Boone, Kenneth Greene, Wendy Hunter, William Hurst, Patricia Mac- Lachlan, Rose McDermott, Rafl Madrid, and three anonymous reviewers for excellent comments on earlier versions, and to the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin for its continuing support for my research. ' Even a very astute, perceptive institutionalist such as Samuel Huntington believed in 1984, im- mediately before the fall of communism, that the likelihood of democratic development in Eastern Europe is virtually nil; Huntington, Will More Countries Become Democratic? Political Science Quarterly 99 (Summer 1984), 217. On the low success rate of expert predictions, see the thorough analysis by Philip Tetlock, Expert PoliticalJudgment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 2 Peter Hall and Rosemary Taylor, Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms, Politi- cal Studies 44 (December 1996); Ira Katznelson and Barry Weingast, eds., Preferences and Situations (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2005). World Politics 60 (January 2008), 281-314

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