Paul Pierson - Politics in Time
Just finished reading Paul Pierson’s new-ish book [Pierson, P (2004) Politics in Time: History, Institutions and Social Analysis. Oxford: Princeton University Press.] Have put together the review below for Policy World:
Paul Pierson, Avice Saint Chair in Public Policy at the University of California at Berkley, is probably best known to social policyists for his contributions to the debate on welfare state resilience and retrenchment, notably his 1994 book Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher and the Politics of Retrenchment and two more recent edited collections European Social Policy: Between Fragmentation and Integration (with Liebfried, 1995) and The New Politics of the Welfare State (2001).
What ties Pierson’s work together is a focus on the importance of institutions and, indeed, the past in shaping - constraining - future policy development. In this book - described in the promotional material as ‘groundbreaking’ - he sets out with the aim of distilling the theoretical elements of his earlier work and, more specifically, ‘to flesh out the often-invoked but rarely examined declaration that history matters’ (p. 2).
The book begins with an analogy: imagine you have been invited to a restaurant - called ‘The Modern Social Scientist’ - which is the finest new eatery in town. The chef, proud of the state-of-the-art kitchen she heads, offers you a tour of it before you eat and explains it is split into two parts. On the left hand side are the ingredients (which she calls ‘variables’) all of which are completely fresh and of the highest quality. On the right is a spectacular range of complex, high-tech measuring devices that astonish all visitors to the kitchen. The chef then explains her culinary approach to you: it is all about having the perfect ingredients, perfectly measured. She says that if this condition is met then the cooking process - including the sequence of which ingredients are added when and how the different ingredients are combined - does not matter. ‘Few would want to patronize a restaurant with such a philosophy of cooking’, Pierson argues (p.1), ‘but most social scientists are working in that kind of kitchen’ This sets the tone for the rest of the book which expands on the central claims that timing and sequence matter hugely in the policy making process.
Pierson build this argument up - appropriately enough - in a logical sequence of related claims. The first chapter explores the notion of path dependency which has permeated much of the welfare state literature in recent years - most notably underpinning claims in the comparative field that we see a number of distinct and enduring welfare regimes across the world. There has been much confusion about the notion of path dependency - some even viewing it as the claim that nothing changes - so Pierson proceeds carefully here. He introduces the notion of positive feedback - the claim that each step down a particular path reinforces the likelihood of future change following the same direction because the costs of switching rise. The notion is central to his definition of path dependence which he uses to refer to ’social processes that exhibit positive feedback and thus generate branching patterns of historical development’ (p. 21).
The second chapter then examines the issues of timing and sequence. The claim here is that ‘there are instances in which we wish to know not just what the ‘value’ of some variable is, but the time at which it occurred. We want to know not just what, but when’ (p. 54). More specifically, his argument is that timing and conjunctures need to be viewed hand-in-hand: when two events or conditions are present at the same time their effects may be quite different in different time periods. This is particularly so given the presence of positive feedback in policy systems: if a particular path is well entrenched before two conditions are present that the impact is likely to differ from circumstances in which that is not the case. What this means at a practical level is that policies can miss the boat so to speak: recent campaigns to universalise health care in the USA, for instance, had little chance of success in the face of the entrenched power of the ‘medical-industrial complex’ but might, as in other countries, have succeeded at an earlier date. Pierson (p. 77) argues that ‘in a fundamental sense, these reformers were too late’.
This links into the third of themes tackled in the text: the long-term nature of social and political processes. Pierson (p.79) argues that ‘the time horizons of most analysts have become increasingly restricted… we look for causes and outcomes that are both temporally contiguous and rapidly unfolding. In the process, we miss a lot’. Drawing an analogy with the natural sciences, he says that a compacted time frame is not always a problem. Some phenomena - he cites the example of a tornado - have short term impacts and develop in short time spans. Other phenomena, however, cannot be appreciated without taking a longer view: earthquakes have a short term (physical) impact but their causes are rooted in long term processes, while global warming has both long term causes and impacts. In the social science, he argues, we need to be think more deeply about the time frames encompassed in our research and, more particularly, to encourage work that considers the long durée, because ‘a great deal of social life is simply off the radar’ at the moment (p. 98).
The remainder of the book builds on these three themes in a discussion of institutional design and development. Here, he places great emphasis on the limits to institutional design, stressing in particular that most institutions are far from malleable and that unintended consequences flow from much political action. Such observations are now commonplace, yet he expresses frustration at the response of most social scientists to these common observations, suggesting for the most part that we sweep these problems under the carpet. Instead, he argues, we need to move such issues to the fore of our analysis: to think much more about the causes of inertia, about ‘deep equilibria’ that resist change and, in an echo of call made by Adrian Sinfield in the last issue of Policy World, to spend more time looking ‘downstream’.
The implications of these claims for policy analysis are manifold, but the most forceful of all is his instance that (p. 165-6): ‘…there are strong arguments for thinking about policy development as something distinct from the ways in which powerful political actors select policies at a moment in time… [for] the preoccupation with moments of policy choice can often direct our attention towards the dramatic and away from the important’.
There is no doubt that this is another impressive contribution from Pierson. It is not, though, a book that will appeal to everyone; indeed, it may, ultimately, appeal to a rather limited audience for two key reasons. The first is that for those with a strong interest in the institutionalist literature there is a little that is new in the book for it draws heavily on a number of previously published (albeit excellent) articles. The second is that for those with a more general interest - perhaps drawn to Pierson’s work as consequence of his writings on the welfare state - may well be put off by the very abstract nature of the text. Paul Spicker (2001: 151-2) said of an earlier Pierson text (The New Politics of the Welfare State) that it ‘takes no prisoners… it all makes sense if you sit and work at it, but the labour reminded me of nothing so much as schooldays struggling with Latin prose’. While the prose is clear in this instance, Spicker’s charge remains true here. There are few empirical illustrations of his claims and the book can be heavy going. Moreover, it focuses for the most part on top level political institutions rather than the institutions of the welfare state that emerge from them. It will, perhaps, be read by few social policyists as a consequence.
References
Pierson, P (Ed) (2001) The New Politics of the Welfare State. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pierson, P & Liebfried, S (1995) European Social Policy: Between Fragmentation and Integration. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press.
Pierson, P (1994) Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher and the Politics of Retrenchment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Spicker, P (2001) ‘Review: The New Politics of the Welfare State’, Journal of Social Policy, 31 (1), 151-2.
