方法对比

	Path Dependence Analysis	Critical Junctures Analysis
领域	Historical Institutionalism	Historical Institutionalism
方法族	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
起源年份	2000	1991
提出者	Paul Pierson	Ruth Berins Collier and David Collier
类型	causal-framework	causal-framework
开创性文献	Pierson, P. (2000). Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics. American Political Science Review, 94(2), 251-267.	Collier, R. B., & Collier, D. (1991). Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the Labor Movement, and Regime Dynamics in Latin America. Princeton University Press. ISBN: 9780691078304
别名	Increasing-returns analysis, Self-reinforcing sequence analysis, Institutional lock-in analysis, Historical lock-in study	Critical juncture framework, Formative-moment analysis, Branch-point analysis, Junctures-and-legacies approach
相关	3	3
摘要	Path dependence analysis explains why history matters by showing how early, sometimes accidental events set in motion self-reinforcing processes that lock in particular institutional or policy trajectories. Drawing on the economics of increasing returns and elaborated for political science by Paul Pierson and for comparative-historical sociology by James Mahoney, the approach holds that once a society starts down a track, the relative costs of reversal rise over time, so that the same initial conditions could have produced very different stable outcomes. Small contingent choices at a formative moment become amplified by positive feedback, learning effects, coordination, adaptive expectations, and sunk investments, until alternatives that were once feasible become prohibitively expensive. The method directs analysts to identify the contingent origin, specify the concrete mechanisms of reproduction, and demonstrate the increasing returns that make a path durable. It thereby converts the loose intuition that the past constrains the present into a disciplined account of temporally ordered, self-reinforcing causation.	Critical junctures analysis explains long-run institutional divergence by locating brief, formative periods in which the structural constraints on action loosen and actors' choices can set societies onto durable, contrasting trajectories. Developed most influentially by Ruth Berins Collier and David Collier in their study of labor incorporation in Latin America, the framework couples a moment of heightened contingency, the critical juncture, with the lasting legacy it produces and the reactive sequences that reproduce that legacy over time. The approach is comparative by design: it examines several cases sharing similar antecedent conditions, shows how different choices at the juncture generated different legacies, and traces how each legacy was carried forward through subsequent reactions and counter-reactions. By distinguishing the rare windows when agency is decisive from the long stretches when structures dominate, critical-junctures analysis reconciles contingency with durable patterning and supplies the formative moment that path-dependence accounts require.