Critical Junctures and Historical Legacies

David Collier is Chancellor's Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. His scholarly contributions were recognized in 2014, when he received the Johann Skytte Prize, the preeminent international award in the discipline of political science. At Berkeley, he served as Department Chair and Chair of the Center for Latin American Studies. His research focuses on democracy and authoritarianism, Latin American politics, comparative-historical analysis, and methodology. Collier’s books include Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the Labor Movement, and the Regime Dynamics in Latin America (with Ruth Berins Collier; Princeton University Press, 1991, reissued in 2002), which won the Best Book Prize of the APSA Comparative Politics Section and is a seminal work in the field of critical junctures and comparative historical analysis. His co-authored and co-edited methodological work includes Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards, 2nd expanded edition (Rowman & Littlefield, 2010); Statistical Models and Causal Inference: A Dialogue with the Social Sciences (Cambridge University Press, 2009); Concepts and Method in Social Science (Routledge, 2009), and The Oxford Handbook of Political Methodology (Oxford University Press, 2008). Within the American Political Science Association, he has served as President of the Organized Section for Comparative Politics, Vice President of the Association, and founding President of the Organized Section for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research. Collier is an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His more recent awards, along with the Skytte Prize, include the 2014 Frank J. Goodnow Award for Distinguished Service to Political Science and the American Political Science Association.Gerardo L. Munck is Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California (USC). His books include Authoritarianism and Democratization. Soldiers and Workers in Argentina, 1976-83 (Penn State University Press, 1998); Regimes and Democracy in Latin America (Oxford University Press, 2007); Passion, Craft, and Method in Comparative Politics (with Richard Snyder; Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); Measuring Democracy: A Bridge Between Scholarship and Politics (Johns Hopkins University, 2009); A Middle-quality Institutional Trap: Democracy and State Capacity in Latin America (with Sebastián Mazzuca; Cambridge University Press, 2020); and Contemporary Latin American Politics: The Quest for Democracy and Citizenship Rights (with Juan Pablo Luna; Cambridge University Press, forthcoming, 2022). He is currently completing a book manuscript on the evolution of knowledge about the social world, entitled How Advances in the Social Sciences Have Been Made: The Study of Democracy and Democratization Since 1789. His articles have been published in the Annual Review of Political Science, World Politics, Comparative Politics, and Comparative Political Studies. The awards he has received include the 2003 Award for Conceptual Innovation in Democratic Studies, of the International Political Science Association (IPSA) Committee on Concepts and Methods (C&M) and the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO), Mexico; and the Frank Cass Prize for Best Overall Article in Democratization in 2016.

The notion of a critical juncture has become a key idea in social science to capture the interaction of structure and agency in ways that open up new intellectual horizons and free us from outdated frameworks. This volume brings together the leading scholars on the topic and will become the standard reference work.

• ContentsList of Figures and TablesPrefaceIntroduction: Tradition and Innovation in Critical Juncture ResearchDavid Collier and Gerardo L. MunckI. Basics: Core Concepts and Big Substantive Questions1. Critical Juncture Framework and the Five-Step TemplateDavid Collier2. Critical Junctures and Developmental Paths: Colonialism and Long-Term Economic ProsperityJames A. Robinson3. Postwar Settlements and International Order: A Critical Juncture PerspectiveG. John Ikenberry4. Mobilization, Protest, and Conflicts of the 1960s: What Is the Legacy, and How Did It Unfold?Sidney TarrowII. Framework and Methods: Historical Causation and Causal Inference5. The Theoretical Foundations of Critical Juncture Research: Critique and ReconstructionGerardo L. Munck6. Critical Junctures, Contingency, and Models of Institutional ChangeRachel Beatty Riedl and Kenneth M. Roberts7. Qualitative Causal Inference and Critical Junctures: The Problem of Backdoor PathsDavid Waldner8. Quantitative Methods and Critical Junctures: The Strengths and Limits of Quantitative HistoryGerardo L. MunckIII. Substantive Applications I: States and Political Regimes9. Nineteenth-Century State Formation and Long-Term Economic Performance in Latin AmericaSebastián L. Mazzuca10. Religion and Critical Junctures: Divergent Trajectories of Liberalism in Modern EuropeAndrew C. Gould11. Evaluating Critical Junctures in Latin America: Historical vs. Proximate Causes in the 1940sRuth Berins Collier12. Regime Transitions as Critical Junctures: Cultural Legacies of Democratization in Spain and PortugalRobert M. Fishman13. Leninist Extinction? Critical Junctures, Legacies, and the Study of Post-CommunismDanielle N. Lussier and Jody LaPorteIV. Substantive Applications II: Neoliberalism and Political Parties 14. Temporal Distance, Reactive Sequences, and Institutional Legacies: Reflections on Latin America’s Neoliberal Critical JuncturesKenneth M. Roberts15. A New Critical Juncture? Analyzing Party System Transformation in South American PoliticsSamuel Handlin16. A Fourth Critical Juncture? Party Politics in Contemporary ChileTimothy R. Scully17. Potential Mistakes, Plausible Options: Establishing the Legacy of Hypothesized Critical JuncturesTaylor C. Boas18. Critical Junctures and Contemporary Latin America: A Note of CautionRobert R. KaufmanV Conclusion19. The Power and Promise of Critical Juncture ResearchGerardo L. MunckAppendix I Conceptions of a Critical Juncture and Cognate TermsAppendix II Glossary of Terms Used in Critical Juncture ResearchAppendix III Bibliography of Substantive Research on Critical Junctures Appendix IV Examples of Critical Juncture ResearchIndex About the Contributors