It is true that some classic works that analyze institutions in historical perspective have enjoyed a more or less continuous life on political science syllabi. Books by Max Weber, Maurice Duverger, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Locke, Woodrow Wilson, Robert McCloskey, and Samuel Beer are prominent examples. Such work was increasingly sidelined, however, with the rise of behaviorism after the Second World War, particularly with the emergence of survey research and computer technology. With the availability of large data-sets on contemporaneous attitudes, elections, and legislative roll call votes, and with statistical analysis of those data made enormously easier by computers and statistical software, political scientists largely abandoned the study of history and institutional structures in the 1960s.
However, after a hiatus of several decades, the study of institutions in historical perspective reemerged in political science in the 1970s, took on new, more analyt- ical, epistemological characteristics, and Xowered in the 1980s and 1990s. Why this reemergence? The simplest explanation is that economic relationships were in crisis, if that is not too strong a word (‘‘Xux’’ would be far too mild). Largely as a result of their revealed malfunctions and vulnerabilities, post-Second World War
democratic institutions based on stable economic growth were being criticized and challenged in the 1970s as they had not been since the 1940s.
Increasingly loud criticism of institutions that had long been taken for granted (particularly those concerned with regulation, money supply, and social welfare) now provoked questions that intrigued a generation of scholars: why had those institutions been created, how had they evolved to reach this point, and why were they no longer adapting successfully to changing needs? How, in other words, had the stable, adaptive path dependence of Western institutions come to experience operational crisis and undermined conWdence in the ideas and processes on which they were founded? And how did the diVerent sets of national institutions diVer in the way they accommodated to the new economy of the late twentieth century? That it raised such questions should not imply that Wnding the answers has been easy for HI, as the approach lends itself much better to the study of incremental growth around an original path than to sudden, drastic change.
