Institutional Survival and Return: Examples from the New Pension Orthodoxy.
Guardiancich, I. (2009). Institutional Survival and Return: Examples from the New Pension Orthodoxy. ETUI Working Paper 2009. 08.
In a path-breaking study, which marks a new phase in historical institutionalism, Streeck and Thelen (2005) show how a rigid dichotomy between path dependent, incremental adaptation and radical transformation fails to capture important transformative processes common to advanced political economies. While their research focuses on examples of gradual but radical transformation, the two authors leave open the interpretation of what constitutes abrupt, but only incremental change. This article integrates their framework, defines what they call ‘survival and return’ and, within this genus, indicates analytically distinct species. To shed light on the concept, Croatian and Hungarian pension reforms in the late 1990s are compared. Despite the two countries’ efforts to introduce systemic changes in their retirement systems, flawed policy-making created enough institutional incoherence to steer the new arrangements away from their original designs, thereby making further hybridisation and marginalisation all the more possible. The paper analyses the two cases and individuates two distinct phenomena falling under the ‘survival and return’ category: replication, where the institution survives due to the redundancy of the new logic of action with respect to the old one; and reaction, where structural reforms generate demand for the old institutional logic, which is ultimately reintroduced.