Speaker: Prof. Giovanni Capoccia (Oxford)
Chair: Jonathan Hopkin, Government Department
Time: Tuesday 4 March, 6:00-7:30pm
Location: 32 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, room G.03
Historical institutionalist theories of endogenous institutional change have provided a theoretical vocabulary for analysing how institutions may be renegotiated over the long term by social and political actors. Their theorization, however, of the causal impact of institutions themselves on political outcomes —including their own change and reform— is less developed. This paper takes stock of the current debate and outlines theoretical strategies designed to integrate historical institutionalism’s insights into endogenous institutional change with a systematic analysis of the causal impact of institutions in processes of change. In particular, the institutionalization of normative categories and the distribution of agenda-setting power within institutional configurations are crucial variables for understanding how pre-existing institutions may in some cases enable institutional incumbents to prevent, resist, delay, or channel institutional change. Paying attention to these factors constitutes a first step towards a more systematic theorization of the role that the supporters of the institutional status quo play in the politics of institutional stability and change, a role that has so far remained undertheorized.
Giovanni Capoccia is Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Defending Democracy: Reactions to Extremism in Interwar Europe (2006 Best Book Prize in European Politics from the American Political Science Association) and the co-editor of The Historical Turn in Democratization Studies. His research interests focus on democratization, European politics and the theory of political institutions. He is currently completing a book on how Western European democracies have dealt with Fascist legacies after 1945. An excerpt from the project has received the award for the best paper in comparative politics presented at the American Political Science Annual Meeting. From September 2014 he will be holding a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship.