A Critique of the Use of Path Dependency in Policy Studies

By A. Kay. 2005

499 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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Understanding the historical turn in the policy sciences: A critique of stochastic, narrative, path dependency and process-sequencing models of policy-making over time (2006, background): “However, as Buthe (2002) and others have noted, learning can also involve exogenous lesson-drawing, i.e. bringing new idea into existing subsystems, and undermining existing paradigms (Dobrowolsky and Saint-Martin, 2005, Kay, 2005).”
Legislating a Woman’s Seat on the Board: Institutional Factors Driving Gender Quotas for Boards of Directors (2014, unknown): “Social scientists have used path dependency theory especially in comparative politics (Pierson 2000), for example, to analyze the development of European party systems in different country members (Lipset and Rokkan 1967; see Kay 2005).”
The missing link between the theory and empirics of path dependence: Conceptual clarification, testability issue, and methodological implications (2010, background): “Page (2006, p. 90) establishes that ‘increasing returns are neither necessary nor sufficient for path dependence’: what is really required to sustain a path is a mechanism that decreases the relative attractiveness of alternatives (Arrow, 2000; Kay, 2005).”