Altered states : international relations, domestic politics, and institutional change

Scholars in the social sciences have recently rediscovered the role that a country's formal institutions - for example, its policy-making processes, the role of its judiciary, and its state-societal relations - and its formal institutions, including norms and customs, play in shaping politics. Conventional wisdom suggests that institutions change only rarely and massively: large-scale changes follow wars, depressions and crises. "Altered States" develops a "new institutionalist" perspective - using seven case studies from the United States, East and West Europe, Cuba, Russia and the former Soviet Union - which shows how institutions change more frequently and incrementally than commonly expected, and demonstrates the key role that reform-minded policy entrepreneurs play in inducing institutional transformation. This important new collection is an innovative combination of cross-national empirical investigations and theoretical explanation of the roles national institutions play in affecting policy change.