Critical Juncture Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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A critical juncture is an episode of pivotal transformation, during which an institution undergoes fundamental and revolutionary change. Critical junctures are unlike other changes because critical junctures are not incremental: They are one-time episodes with lasting consequences. The critical juncture secures a choice or a path through which the institution continues after the juncture has passed .The choice is secured, or “locked in,” because other choices are either excluded from later analyses or because other options are eliminated through cost-benefit comparison. As part of the path-dependency analysis, a critical juncture helps establish the trajectory of a society.

Identifying a critical juncture is, strictly speaking, only possible after the fact. Analysts cannot know that a critical juncture is in fact critical until afterwards, because it requires that the institution(s) it fosters become self-reinforcing. Identifying an event as a critical juncture often involves creating counterfactual projections as to what might otherwise have occurred. In this way, an episode may be identified as critical to an institution’s creation, it or contributes to how an institution has changed. Counterfactual arguments explain how a moment was critical by creating possible alternatives to history.

Of course, journalists and politicians often see particular movements as historic even as they happen, but a historic moment is not necessarily a critical juncture. At times, it seems that social forces move inexorably toward a certain outcome. For instance, given the preceding rise in women’s status in the legal profession, the appointment of a woman to the U.S. Supreme Court in the twentieth century seemed inevitable at some point, if not exactly when it would occur.

By contrast, critical junctures are contingent on preceding events, but yield unexpected outcomes of these events. A crucial facet of critical junctures is that, though proceeded by enabling social conditions, they are context specific and differ from society to society. These episodes may last moments or linger on for years, depending on the circumstances. Critical junctures interrupt or profoundly influence existing institutions, but are unpredictable even by those familiar with a society’s institutions.

Scholars who employ path dependency as an explanation of events therefore investigate antecedent conditions to a critical juncture, but rely more heavily on posterior events. Not only do different environments and actors within societies affect how critical junctures affect the development of an institution, but different institutions and processes are more susceptible to change than others. Antecedent conditions cannot reliably predict if there will be a critical juncture, what will change, or how the institution will change. Following a critical juncture is a period of historical legacy in which the effects of the juncture persist. This legacy may become evident directly after the juncture, or it may become evident only long after the event has transpired. For instance, the Magna Carta in 1215, which established certain rights of the nobility in England, is now recognized as a critical step toward universal human rights.

Critics of analyses that employ critical junctures argue that the concept is either too broad to be useful or too vague to explain anything. The idea of a critical juncture may be applied to different contexts, but it may also be so context specific that it cannot be generalized to other circumstances. The same scenarios, actors, and processes are unlikely to occur in and influence disparate processes. Likewise, the concept of a critical juncture leaves unanswered how long a juncture might last or specific attributes that a critical juncture must entrench before it becomes important.

Analyses that use the critical juncture framework are also criticized as being overly deterministic, and exclude the role of individual actors outside the critical juncture and may be unfalsifiable. Also, path dependent solutions work only in hindsight, and while most historical analysis allows analysts to develop predictions, a key component of a critical juncture is that the outcome is either random or unpredictable. In this way, critical junctures inhibit prediction. Lastly, deterministic arguments may create logical tautologies: Something is a critical juncture because it shaped an institution as such, and something was shaped as such because of the critical juncture.

Critical junctures are widely used within political science to explain important moments in the history of a society or institution. Scholars point to seemingly important events and attempt to show how an incident shaped an outcome that might not have been, no matter how entrenched it has become. While many argue that such analysis lacks scientific rigor, others argue that explaining these critical moments is important to understanding how institutions develop.

Bibliography:

Collier, Ruth Berins, and David Collier. Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the Labor Movement and Regime Dynamics in Latin America. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mahoney, James. “Path Dependence in Historical Sociology.” Theory and Society 29, no. 4 (2000): 507–548.
Pierson, Paul. “Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics.” American Political Science Review 94, 2 (2001): 251–267.
Politics in Time: History, Institutions and Social Analysis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.