Periodizing, paths and probabilities: why critical junctures and path dependence produce causal confusion

This review examines four recent works in political economy seeking to make sense of the political and economic changes of the 1970s. This recent wave of work increasingly sees these institutional changes as the result of forces endogenous to the political and economic institutions of the post-war era, but it also continues to make use of the common practice of seeing history as an alternation between deterministic path dependence and contingent critical junctures. This review argues that when applied to these and similar endogenous arguments, the approach of path dependence and critical junctures is unable to empirically distinguish between deterministic and contingent processes, despite being conceptually predicated on the distinction between the two. This argument is demonstrated by showing that these arguments about the transformations of the 1970s can be flipped between deterministic and contingent explanations based on nearly the same empirical evidence. The review then addresses the recent development of ‘gradualist’ mechanisms of institutional change, like drift, layering, and conversion, to show that they do not resolve this difficulty. The review concludes by proposing a research agenda based on an alternative empirical approach specifically tailored to understanding endogenous institutional change.