“Revitalizing Labor in the U.S., Britain and Germany: Social Movements and Institutional Change”

Institutions shape behavior. This is the core argument of the theorists of modern institutionalism, an argument that has proven clear, parsimonious, and widely applicable for many different institutions and behaviors in a variety of circumstances and settings (e.g., Hall 1986; March and Olsen 1989; Steinmo et al. 1992). Still, for an understanding of historical and contemporary change, this powerful argument is not enough, as most institutionalists readily admit (Thelen and Steinmo 1991). The institutional argument in fact tells us nothing of how institutions come to be and how they change--with obvious consequences for the behavior they are shaping. New propositions are therefore needed, and in this paper we examine the following: social movements shape institutions