This article reviews recent contributions to International Relations (IR) that engage the substantive concerns of historical institutionalism and explicitly and implicitly employ that tradition's analytical features to address fundamental questions in the study of international affairs. It explores the promise of this tradition for new research agendas in the study of international political development, including the origin of state preferences, the nature of governance gaps, and the nature of change and continuity in the international system. The article concludes that the analytical and substantive profiles of historical institutionalism can further disciplinary maturation in IR, and it proposes that the field be more open to the tripartite division of institutional theories found in other subfields of Political Science.

Historical institutionalism has steadily expanded its empirical scope and refined its analytical toolbox since it crystallized as a tradition of political analysis during the “new institutionalisms” debate. This chapter details the origins and evolution of historical institutionalism, placing particular emphases on the temporal concepts that inform its analytical toolbox. It begins with a discussion of historical institutionalims’s evolving relationship with other varieties of institutional analysis, before debating temporal concepts such as critical junctures, path dependence, intercurrence, and modes of gradual change. A third section identifies analytical, methodological, and empirical areas of potential growth.

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Explains how variations in the structure of a country's economic system shape their preferences over other forms of multilateral international organizations. It specifically answers why Britain and Germany advocated different regulatory structures in the European Union's monetary, social, and industrial policies in the context of negotiating the content of the Maastricht Treaty. Theoretically, the paper explores ways in which the varieties of capitalism framework can be extended to the domain of international relations.

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