CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2023
| Author | Karlo Mikić |
|---|---|
| Title | The Minimal Account of Path Dependence: Redeveloping the Concept of Path Dependence Based on its Use in Political Science |
| Summary | This thesis aims to (re)develop the concept of path dependence from the ground up, starting at the simplest intuitive understanding of the term as used in the work of political scientists in the tradition of historical institutionalism, i.e. that “history matters”, or that past events can influence the range of possibilities and likelihood of certain possibilities among the future events. This conceptual engineering is undertaken because the standard account of path dependence taken from economics is shown to be inapplicable to social reality and the proposals for a theoretical framework that would replace it have not attained the needed coherence required of a complete theory, nor were they able to keep all of the interesting and important aspects asked for in the literature, useful in analyzing institutional change. The thesis has three main parts: the first presents the standard account in economics and its application in the context of political science, the second part is reviewing the literature regarding the previous proposals for extending, changing or reviving the standard account for the needs of political science and showing their incompleteness, the third part develops and presents the original minimal account proposed as a theoretical framework for grounding the concept of path dependence, while also allowing its further specification. |
| Supervisor | Imre Gergely Szabo |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2023/mikic_karlo.pdf |
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