Political scientists of the world unite against the decontextual revolution; you have nothing to lose but your n! Okay, there is no such call to arms in Paul Pierson's important new work, but his book is a well-crafted shot across the bow of the dominant strains in political science. As Pierson sees it, too much of political science scholarship rips politics from its historical and institutional context for the sake of generating carefully bounded causal arguments that are often misleading, if not dead wrong, about the sources and effects of political stability and change. Thus, the aim of Politics in Time is to critique and offer an alternative approach to the tendency of analyzing politics by “reducing a moving picture to a snapshot” (104).

Although rational choice theory seems to be his bête noire, Pierson frames his argument as more of a corrective than a displacement—more reformist than counter-revolutionary, shall we say. He wants to find a way to combine the precision of argument offered by rational choice approaches with the attentiveness to historical and institutional processes offered by fields such as American Political Development. To this end, Pierson emphasizes that political scientists should seek to deal directly with the complexity and opacity of politics rather than spending too much time and effort building large-n scale and multiple variable studies on the assumption that the political world is defined by economic rationality and composed of transparently self-interested actors.

In chapter 1, Pierson begins to guide us through the muck of politics by arguing that we must understand the role of path dependence, the idea that the practices and perspectives of institutions, ideologies and policy regimes—three major types of political systems—become difficult to intentionally amend, divert or displace as their status is reinforced through positive feedback. This positive feedback can take the form of, say, political actors adapting their actions and objectives to accord with systemic norms, or of political commitments generated through and subsequently dependent upon the mode of operation and/or worldview of an institution, ideology or policy regime. Pierson is at pains to point out that path dependence is not simply about political systems becoming “locked in” at their origins, leaving subsequent actors no choice but to follow blindly in their wake. Such a claim would allow for no account of political change, and would also amount to a flat, misguided understanding of political stability—not Pierson's aim at all. Rather, he argues that we need more long-range analyses of the role of positive feedback, which consists of the “self-reinforcing processes” evident in “collective action, institutional development, the exercise of authority, and social interpretation” (40). The task for political scientists is to investigate these processes with concern for how political stability and/or change are influenced by such factors as: the “initial set of conditions” that allow for a “range of outcomes” in a system's development; the “relatively small events” that “if occurring at the right moment, can have large and enduring consequences”; the “timing and sequencing” of events; and the formation of a “single equilibrium” that solidifies a political system's resilience (44).

What Pierson wants is for political scientists to be able to determine with a certain degree of precision how and why things happen by looking at when they happen. The question of when, however, is not marked out in straightforward temporal terms—i.e., x happened, then y happened, so x caused y. Instead, as he convincingly explains in chapter 2, we should be concerned with when things happened in relation to the institutional and historical context, with specific attention to the long-term development and articulation of social capacities (e.g., social literacy, role of particular interests, industries) and claims to political space (e.g., informal and formal rules of entry and participation). The point here is that x does not occur in a vacuum, as pre-existent social capacities and the dynamics of political space have considerable influence over the political impact of x. By this same logic, however, one can not immediately know the full impact of x, because even if it is a small event, it may have unintended “downstream consequences” (52). Given this complex setting, the task here is to study more substantial time horizons in order to gain the best possible understanding of political developments and changes.

However, as Pierson shows, decontextual causal arguments clearly dominate the theoretical approaches of political science today. In chapter 3, he helpfully sets out four ways to frame a causal account, with short and long time horizons possible on both the cause and outcome ends of the spectrum. The most decontextualized claims are those that combine short causal and short outcome horizons. These claims see political events as “tornadoes,” arriving quickly and with short-term effects. At the other end of the spectrum reside those political developments that move at the pace of “global warming”—long-term causes with long-term effects (81). Pierson finds that far too often political scientists identify political tornadoes when in fact deeper patterns are likely having a more profound effect on the political environment. He looks at four years' worth of articles in major political science journals to quantify the distribution in the type of causal accounts being made. Among the four different short/long combinations, it was the short-cause/short-effect political “tornado” accounts that won the day. Most notably, 51.8 per cent of the articles in the American Political Science Review and 56.6 per cent of those in the American Journal of Political Science made short/short causal claims, with the second closest account, that of the long/long argument, never reaching higher than 10 per cent (98).

What these distributions mean is that many political scientists may be misreading the sources of political change, “inferring that the actors who appear to possess the greatest political resources at that moment are responsible for the outcomes observed at that moment” (102). In other words, the image one gets from short/short causal accounts is that political actors can produce political change almost instantaneously, as if the cause of an earthquake can be attributed to the last person to walk on the fault line. For the balance of the book, in chapters 4 and 5, Pierson provides analysis and argues for a more complex reading of how we define and trace causes and effects in politics. In so doing, he consistently asserts a number of what he considers to be basic principles regarding politics; his most notable point are as follows: that the power of political systems, from institutions to social interpretations, is more profound and deeply embedded than are the seemingly purposive actions of political agents; more often than not political systems transform through a process of slow development rather than sharp change; institutions are much more resilient than they are elastic; and unintended consequences have a greater influence over political development than do the functional design of actors. Given these conditions, he surmises, the goal of political science research might be better framed as seeking to understand the “ways in which things happen” rather than looking to produce unambiguous causal claims (176–7).

In a sense, then, Pierson's argument is meant to have a chastening effect on the scientific aspirations of political scientists, without surrendering the goal of generating rigorous analysis. In fact, his argument raises serious questions about the degree to which the appearance of scientific rigour in the study of politics is generated at the expense of deeper, if less parsimonious, understandings of the complex dynamics of political life. While he is generally successful in this effort, there are a couple of ways in which the book's promises do not quite equal its achievements.

First, Pierson's argument is really more about placing politics in a spatial and temporal context than placing politics in time alone. Since space and time are mutually constitutive, placing politics in time is necessarily also an effort to place politics into the proper spatial setting, ergo Pierson's focus on path dependence and positive feedback as processes that serve to remember history and define space. I note this distinction both because it could have been better clarified in the text and because while Politics in Time is undoubtedly a better title than Politics in Context, the casual observer should not be fooled into thinking that Pierson's argument is merely an effort to make political scientists act more like historians (even if that might make our historian colleagues happy). It would be a shame for this book to be unfairly dismissed in this way. Second, while Pierson claims to be concerned with the role of “social interpretations,” his argument is more convincing with regards to collective action, policy development and, especially, institutions. In fact, he pays almost no attention to the methodological need to analyze social interpretations as expressed through political discourse and political culture, both of which I would argue profoundly influence the “way in which things happen” in politics. This absence is likely a consequence of Pierson's reach exceeding his grasp, no great crime. However, it also reflects the dearth of studies that seek to examine the influence of political culture and discourse on the scope of political stability and the circumstances contributing to political change. If there is to be a sustainable counter-revolution against the decontextualists, this sort of work needs to be done. Nevertheless, Pierson's excellent study makes a provocative and necessary contribution to the discipline. It is destined to become a staple of upper-level undergraduate and graduate classes, especially those concerning the study of methods and institutions. In this way, Politics in Time serves the cause of widening the methodological terrain for present and future scholars of politics.