This chapter focuses on past literature on resource-wealthy countries and examines how alluvial diamond wealth may present unique challenges for states. State theory is discussed, and the “opaque” state concept is compared and contrasted with these. Then, an overview of different arguments that have been made to explain the relative decline of Zimbabwean institutions is given. Most of these can fall into three central categories: the psychology of leaders in ZANU-PF, the failure of economic policy, and external sanctions. The large diamond find in eastern Zimbabwe in 2006 is presented as a “critical juncture” for Zimbabwean institutions. Thus, this chapter places Zimbabwe in the overall population of cases when it comes to resource wealth and compares and contrasts how past approaches to resource politics, which have heavily focused on the oil sector, provide a roadmap for examining alluvial diamond wealth. However, this research must also be built upon as different resources, particularly a rapid increase in alluvial diamond wealth in the case of Zimbabwe, bring various challenges to state capacity and democratization.

Housing is a defining issue of our time, driving a persistent affordability crisis, financial instability, and economic inequality. Through the Roof examines the crucial role of the state in shaping the housing markets of two economic powerhouses – the United States and Germany. The book starts with a puzzle: Free-market America has vigorously supported homeownership markets with generous government programs, while social-market Germany has slashed policy support for both homeownership and rental markets throughout the past century. The book explains why the two nations have adopted such radically different and unexpected housing policy approaches. Drawing on extensive archival material and interviews with policymakers, it argues that contrasting forms of capitalism – demand-led in the United States and export-oriented in Germany – resulted in divergent housing policies. In both countries, these policies have subsequently transformed capitalism itself.

Around the world, countries have set up climate institutions that putatively “depoliticize” climate policymaking, removing decisions from the realm of partisan politics or delegating decisions to technocratic bodies. Here, we offer an empirical reassessment of such apolitical institutions in the UK, Norway, Denmark, and Australia. We find that what seems in many cases like depoliticization – upon closer examination – proves anything but. Instead, we offer a reinterpretation of climate advisory institutions as the path-dependent product of distributive and partisan conflicts. New climate institutions did not emerge merely as a result of norms about public goods provision and efforts to reshape intertemporal policymaking incentives, to provide stability, or to solve the gap between current and future welfare needs. Instead, these institutions addressed core distributive conflicts over climate policy, the short- or medium-term political needs of incumbent governments, or both. In turn, we argue that this political context surrounding their creation has limited the degree to which they can stabilize policy over time or depoliticize climate policy debates.

Chapter 1 is devoted to the history of trilogues, tracing their origins and showing why they were created and how they have changed over time. In particular, the chapter highlights that trilogues have characterized the "European way" of adopting legislation since 1975, when the Parliament attained its first competences in budgetary matters and successfully advocated for the establishment of a conciliation procedure. The establishment of this procedure, which bears striking similarities to today’s trilogues, should be regarded as a “critical juncture.” It set a specific trajectory of institutional development and consolidation that has significantly shaped legislative interactions up to the present day, especially in the wake of subsequent Treaty amendments that have increasingly placed the three institutions in a relationship of mutual dependence.

The concluding chapter identifies three broad contributions of the book: explaining the choices made by states about language; offering explicit historical institutionalist accounts of the politics of language by centering the analysis on the state and using notions of legacies, critical juncture, path dependency, layering, conversion, and drift, among others; and, the further development, leveraging, and testing of the concept of state traditions as a theoretical and analytical focus for explaining language policy. The chapter also synthesizes the important points coming out of the case studies drawn from a multiplicity of contexts, namely that processes of state-making and state-building are central in forging the state traditions that steer linguistic policies towards specific developmental paths; that the specific nature and configuration of political institutions within a state, not only at founding but also as it evolves over time when adjusting to changing societal dynamics and circumstances, heavily condition the choices states make about language; and that political ideas and norms are central to state traditions since they tend to structure both political and policy development by conditioning the choices of political actors, pushing societies into specific paths of linguistic choices at the expense of others.

This introductory chapter situates the book within the field of comparative politics, noting its distinction from debates that focused on the language planning process, on social mobilization to secure language rights, or on linguistic justice. Instead, it highlights state traditions that produce language regimes, which themselves have a powerful influence on language policy choices. The introduction provides two diagrams that frame the theoretical conception and identifies how each chapter contribution deepens and refines the framework.

This chapter investigates how the International Organization for Migration (IOM) dramatically expanded its involvement in humanitarian emergencies over the past three decades. Building on insights from historical institutionalism in international relations, we hypothesize that crises which touch upon matters of migration may constitute opportunities for IOM to expand the range of its activities as contingencies call for flexible responses that the organization is (the only one) apt to deliver. The 1990-91 Gulf War served as a ‘critical juncture’ in this regard, where IOM started to expand more forcefully into the broad realm of humanitarian assistance. It set a precedent that served as best-practice example and led to an ex post formalization of the institutional expansion through corresponding frameworks for action. As we show in case studies of the 2011 Libyan civil war and the 2014-16 Ebola crisis, this pattern holds across a variety of crisis contexts: humanitarian emergencies expose gaps in the governance architecture that IOM is quick to fill, thereby increasing the range of its activities which is later normalized in institutional rules and practice. Today’s vast array of humanitarian and other crisis-related tasks fulfilled by IOM attest to the lasting ‘power of precedent’.

The conclusion considers the wider significance of the book’s arguments. The concept of ‘modernisation’ was a potent resource for projects for social-democratic renewal over the late twentieth century. Many had the potential to become defining influences on a Labour government – even if, at turning points in the early 1980s, the late 1980s and the early 1990s, they lost out due to a combination of social and economic, intellectual, institutional, and political forces. This means that the rise of New Labour was not inevitable and that its opponents were not straightforwardly ‘traditionalist’. It also means, however, that New Labour’s leaders drew heavily from the left when forging their own agenda, including policies and institutions that endure today. This has implications for the histories of Britain after the 1970s: the rise of neoliberalism, though important, should not obscure other pivotal forces, especially deindustrialisation, constitutional agitation, and popular individualism. The conclusion ends by using this history to suggest that ‘modernisation’ is an idea that is unusually prominent in the tradition of social democracy.

There is no paucity of definitions of the concept of ‘institution’, and often they are somewhat over-encompassing. The chapter discusses several approaches and elaborates on the implications of each of them. The conclusion is that what constitutes an institution is not generalisable and depends largely on the researcher, the object of research and the research question. Different conceptions of institution serve egregiously different research programmes and different types of situations. However, too often different approaches extend their specific understandings of ‘institutions’ to the whole world of institutions, presenting themselves as general theories of institution. This generates inconsistencies when the approach and its theoretical results are applied outside the original scope and extended to the entire universe of institutions. Discussion of the different approaches helps to identify the core properties each highlights and to reconstruct the semantic field of the concept of institution. I focus on the main characterising elements of different understandings.

This chapter introduces the concept of Temporal Focal Points in explaining change in international institutions. In doing so, it elaborates theoretically the arguments contained in the introductory chapter. It models the coordination challenge facing states as a stag hunt game, where international actors can all benefit if they are able to cooperate. In hunting stag – or, engaging in institutional change efforts – actors can move to a Pareto-superior, payoff-dominant equilibrium. The challenge that they face is that if they hunt stag and others do not, they will expend scarce assets and end up significantly worse off. The risk of acting cooperatively when others do not leads actors to persist at inferior, risk-dominant equilibria. This can change suddenly, however, when actors reach a temporal convergence of expectations. The convergence is often facilitated by the arrival of Temporal Focal Points. The heightened probability of successful coordination leads to sharp increases in political and analytical investments. The chapter concludes with a discussion of methodology and case selection.