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This chapter sets out the theoretical framework used in this book. This consists of three complementary theoretical approaches — the Westminster Model, Historical Institutionalism, and Principal-Agent Theory — which each in their own distinct way allows each chapter to dissect and tease apart the politics of delegation in Britain. Moreover, these approaches also operate at distinct levels, which again deepen our understanding of both the theory and practice of delegation.

This chapter submits the historical institutionalist argument that though past legacies of migration regulation leave an important imprint on national approaches, a critical juncture has now been reached, thus, migration policies are in flux and are being recast. The changing nature of the state and the embrace of competition state priorities lead to an economistic approach that divides migrants into desirable and undesirable categories. Therefore, securitization is increasingly defined not only in narrow societal terms but also in terms of economic vitality and competitiveness. Finally, the regulatory legacies in six European countries, namely, Ireland, Germany, France, Italy, Poland, the United Kingdom, and at the European Union level are then being analyzed.

This chapter is concerned with the ways lawyers either do or do not make their voices heard in processes of political, social, and legal transformation. It examines several key moments in legal and political history to determine how the potential of particular groups of lawyers to serve as the collective conscience of legal professional may be developed and enhanced. The chapter explains the notion of critical juncture and evaluates that sociology of the legal profession.

The introductory chapter presents the theoretical framework of the research, its empirical design and the content of the volume. Our analysis of the Charlie Hebdo attacks addresses in particular the claims, frames, and justifications that civil society actors introduce in multiple public spheres. We want to understand both the content and the forms of these interventions by considering the appropriation of existing discursive opportunities by collective actors, but also their embeddedness within strategies of resource mobilization. Locating our research within social movement studies, we point at the cultural dynamics during discursive critical junctures, showing the ways in which different actors address transformative events which challenge their visions. As a “transformative event” the attacks point at the capacity of action itself to produce contextual opportunities and organizational resources that are mobilized in the strategic interactions of various actors. In this chapter, we first reflect on the concept of transformative events as triggering critical junctures, defined as moments in which changes happen suddenly rather than incrementally (as well as subsequent choice points), and on the very conceptions of citizenship that are affected by them. We then move to a discussion of the forms that debates might take in the public sphere (referring in particular to the concept of deliberation). After that, we present our analytic model, followed by a justification of the research design and the methodological choices. The chapter ends with a presentation of the volume.

Chapter 3 introduces time into the picture, exploring how and to what extent a discursive critical juncture triggered by the Charlie Hebdo attacks changed the nature of public discourse, the tone used to address the different dimensions of conflict embedded in the controversy, and the way in which political actors engaged in the debate. By looking at public debates over time, the chapter addresses the potential of critical junctures to change actors’ perspectives on contentious issues and to transform interactions among collective actors. The analysis focuses on three main characteristics of public debates: the type of actors that have access to the public sphere, the issues that they discuss, and the deliberative quality of the debate. The findings indicate that the critical juncture condensed but also neutralized public debates, in that it increased attention but also reduced political conflict over the issues associated with Charlie Hebdo—at least in the mass-media public sphere. In addition, the debate, which hardly met minimum standards of democratic deliberation, further deteriorated during the critical juncture.

This chapter develops a conceptual framework for analyzing federal dynamics inspired by different strands of historical institutionalism. Putting particular emphasis on timing and sequencing, a historical-institutionalist approach suggests a strong causal link between the origins of federal systems and the way they evolve dynamically over time through path dependence and gradual adaption. Dynamics result from the ongoing push and pull between status quo defending and status quo challenging actors who always operate within a historically constructed institutional setting. However, depending on how federal systems reproduce power-concentrating and power-sharing institutional mechanisms, their transformative capacity varies significantly. The path-dependent institutional “grammar”, therefore, has important consequences for the prospects of different types of gradual change within federal systems.

The concluding chapter goes back to the theoretical debates presented in chapter 1, synthetizing the main empirical results of the various parts of our analysis as well as reflecting on the theoretical implications. From the theoretical point of view, the aim has been to analyze transformative events in order to trace their effects on the content and form of the debate in multiple public spheres. The research addressed discursive turns during a critical juncture that changed in the political debate. Empirically, the Charlie Hebdo controversy represented a most important moment in the assessment of collective understandings of citizenship, broadly understood as setting the boundaries of who is inside and who is outside. Opening up to future research in the field, the chapter speculates on the impact of the debate we have addressed in structuring the evolving debate over citizenship and citizenship rights.

This chapter builds a new explanation for the rise of ISDS, drawing on the theoretical tradition of historical institutionalism. It begins with a general discussion of the promise of historical institutionalism, focusing on preferences and unintended consequences. The second section introduces the concept of critical juncture and argues that international officials can determine the outcome of a critical juncture, if certain conditions are met. The chapter specifies these conditions as well as motivations, resources, and strategies of international officials. The third section turns to gradual institutional development, and introduces feedback effects, layering, and conversion as mechanisms that help us understand how institutional structure can be reproduced while simultaneously entailing novel institutional purposes and unintended consequences.

There are five models that analysts have utilized in efforts to depict accurately the evolution of the Russian-American relationship from the late Cold War through the first part of the twenty-first century. While bipolarity characterized the early days of the Cold War, it yielded to a multipolar model in the last decades of that period. Post-Cold war patterns have centered on early American-centered unipolarity, re-emergence of multipolarity, and at times complex or chaotic patterms. In addition, five theories cast light on many of the details of the relationship. While legacy theory displays how some features of the communist past carry over into the post-communist period, the concept of critical junctures pulls our attention to key transitions in the political life and relationship of both powers. Debates about individual foreign policy decisions by both often center on the dialogue between realists and post- or revised-realist theoreticians.

The principal focus of this chapter is continuity and change in the overall institutional architecture of the European Union. This approach explains the perpetuation of the original EU institutional design from the early 1950s up until the first decade of the 2000s, and it also furnishes the crucial background context within which the current euro crisis must be situated. Using the closely related concepts of critical junctures and path dependency to frame the analysis, the chapter takes the long view and provides a historical perspective that combines description, interpretation, and explanation in a rigorous argumentation that serves to highlight the evolution of the EU as a new federal model. It concludes with some reflections about institutional continuity and change in the EU, the notion of crisis as a federal political strategy, and the prospects of more rather than less Europe in the current debate about the direction of European integration.

Historical institutionalism as an explicit tradition has largely remained on the sidelines in international security scholarship, with some exceptions. The chapter begins by reviewing the sources of resistance to the tradition in security studies. The authors then apply its analytical toolbox to two empirical realms at different levels of analysis: divergent regional security paths in East Asia and the Middle East; and the evolution of the nuclear non-proliferation regime. These cases show the utility of historical institutionalism in spanning subnational, regional, and international levels of analysis; its value for examining the role of critical junctures for evolving security arrangements; and its timely applicability beyond topical, geographical, and ontological foci that have been standard fare in security studies.

The institutional designs of international organizations (IOs) are notoriously resistant to reform. Nevertheless, we have witnessed a dramatic transformation of international organizations, from interstate cooperation toward more complex forms of governance, involving participation by transnational actors (TNAs). This chapter maps the speed, scope, and depth of institutional change in TNA access. Combining descriptive statistics with case studies, the chapter explains the dynamics of institutional change that we observe. The chapter argues that the process of change has been driven by two structural factors—deepening cooperation and domestic democratization—in combination with the end of the Cold War as a critical juncture. The end of the Cold War triggered the temporal intersection of these two structural factors, separating an early period of slow and incremental growth in openness from a later period of rapid and profound expansion of TNA access.

In this chapter, light is shed on the historical relationship between the two countries and their respective outside ruling centres, politically, culturally and economically; how European geopolitics and national mobilisation, existing legal traditions and infrastructure can affect the process and outcome of devolution. Critical junctures are identified in the development of Scottish and Norwegian political institutions, and the circumstances - including class structure, electoral reform, the use of proportionality, - leading to the current differing balances of power between central and local government, and contrasting social models and economies in the two countries, based on negotiation versus top-down direction. Finally the chapter looks at what the implications of the Scottish political historical backdrop may have for Scottish independence.

Historical institutionalism offers original ways of thinking about the origins, evolution, and consequences of political institutions—including international order. This chapter argues that a “rise and decline” theory of international order based solely on the distribution of power is inadequate. The idea that leading states periodically have found themselves in a position to build or at least shape international order is not in dispute. But the explanation for the variations in the character of orders depends on more than simply the presence of a powerful lead state. Moments of opportunity for order-building open up and close. The character of the state that finds itself with the opportunity to build order also matters. Employing insights from historical institutionalism, this chapter directs attention to the temporal dynamics that shape international orders, including the timing and sequence of past events that set the stage for subsequent struggles over political institutions.

This chapter examines historical institutionalism (HI) and the role that time and institutions play in societal transformations. HI thereby provides analytical depth to the study of time, realizing that the duration, tempo, timing, and sequencing of historical processes and events affect the onset of societal transformations. Institutions subsequently narrow the range of paths that societal transformations could potentially take, by enabling distinct forms of cooperation between various actors, (re)distributing power and resources, and proscribing and prescribing appropriate behaviour. In the wake of radical and incremental institutional changes, caused by exogenous shocks and endogenous dynamics, societies might embark on new paths. With its analytical focus on the meso level and the nature of time, HI has contributed to the development of middle-range theories that often bridge the traditional actor-structure divide.

The creation and increased usage of permanent international courts to deal with a broad range of issues is a relatively new phenomenon. The founding dates of international courts suggest that three critical junctures were important in the creation of the contemporary international courts: the Hague Peace Conferences and with them the larger movement to regulate inter-state relations through international legal conventions (1899–1927); the post-World War II explosion of international institutions (1945–52); and the end of the Cold War (1990–2005). Examining the effects of these junctures and gradual changes in the practice of international jurisprudence, this chapter argues that the best way to understand the creation, spread, and increased use of “new-style” international courts is by paying close attention to the major changes brought about through long-lasting, slow processes of international institutional evolution.

This chapter sets up the context, and introduces the object of this study and its main arguments. It introduces the main analytical premises of this study and the notions of national identity entrepreneurship and critical juncture. After outlining the methodology of this study, it concludes by providing an overview of the empirical chapters and the main arguments.

The introductory chapter discusses the concepts of legacy and memory and suggests ways to use them in an analysis of long-term effects of movement participation in the transition to democracy on future generations of movements. First, it looks at the ways in which paths of transitions, with particular attention to movement participation in them, have long-term effects on movements to come by creating institutional change. Second, it considers some ways of looking at past eventful protests as mnemonic resources and constraints for social movements. After doing that, the chapter also introduces the research design and presents the remainder of the volume.

Chapter 4 discusses the deliberative qualities of the Charlie Hebdo debate in alternative public spheres. The chapter explains the way in which deliberation has been operationalized for qualitative analysis. It then focuses on the deliberative qualities of the Charlie Hebdo debate among the three main groups of public-sphere actors under examination (far-right, left-wing, and religious groups). There is substantial variation in the deliberative democratic qualities displayed within and across the three public spheres while there is limited variation across countries. In order to account for this phenomena, at the end of the chapter, we reflect on the nature of critical junctures specifically and differences in different public sphere actors’ dispositions toward deliberative and democratic norms.