Pierson, P. (2000). Increasing returns, path dependence, and the study of politics. American Political Science Review, 94(2), 251–267. doi:10.2307/2586011.
Read through its 1997 working-paper precursor (NOTE-1076); the 2000 article was not reached and may differ.
Key takeaways
From the reading, NOTE-1076. Pages are the working paper’s.
- More prevalent in politics. Increasing returns “characterize three of the most prominent features of political environments: processes of institutional development, processes of collective action, and processes of social interpretation” (p. 30).
- More intense in politics. Competition and learning correct weakly, horizons are short and institutions are deliberately sticky (p. 24). Elected officials “employ a high discount rate” (p. 32).
- Outlooks lock in too. “Mental maps are subject to increasing returns” (p. 29), including orientations toward parties.
- Punctuated, not gradual. Path-dependent change shows “long periods of relative stability followed by brief bursts of rapid change” (p. 36).
- No data. One illustration, the failure of opposite US health-care reforms in 1993–96, chosen after the event.
Why this is here
The owner’s U28 put the separation of timescales (elections, tenure, lifespan, generational memory) at the centre of political collectives. A28 named Pierson as the closest existing account. Bears on CLAIM-423.
From the reading, 2026-10-22. Pierson is the nearest source for half of CLAIM-423: he makes the time horizons of political actors a cause of which paths are taken and kept, and calls those horizons understudied. He does not say which component of a polity holds authority over which, so the claim’s own defeater, that “path dependence and two-level games (Pierson, Putnam) already state the claim”, is not met for Pierson on the 1997 text. See NOTE-1076.