Chapter 1 is devoted to the history of trilogues, tracing their origins and showing why they were created and how they have changed over time. In particular, the chapter highlights that trilogues have characterized the "European way" of adopting legislation since 1975, when the Parliament attained its first competences in budgetary matters and successfully advocated for the establishment of a conciliation procedure. The establishment of this procedure, which bears striking similarities to today’s trilogues, should be regarded as a “critical juncture.” It set a specific trajectory of institutional development and consolidation that has significantly shaped legislative interactions up to the present day, especially in the wake of subsequent Treaty amendments that have increasingly placed the three institutions in a relationship of mutual dependence.

This chapter first develops a theoretical framework on the behavioral dynamics behind voters’ responses to different mobilization strategies and their different effects on voter preferences and party identification. It then goes on to explore why these different strategies are available to new parties in the first place. It develops a theoretical model that focuses on the period before a new party contests its first major election to show how the intra-elite dynamics during these founding moments shape early on which mobilization strategies the party adopts.

Chapter 5 asks why the public continues to support restrictive policies given their considerable economic and rights costs. It identifies the predominant values informing and facilitating the liberal state’s governance of contemporary immigration and its implications for restricting human mobility by focusing on the effects of a threat environment in sustaining the onerous policies of the migration policy playing field. It argues that the persistence of these policies can largely be explained by the continued negative framing of these events by political elites and the mass media. In particular, their conflation of public safety and national security with immigration makes the issue more salient for the public, and the popular legitimacy of restrictive policies is sustained and endorsed by center and extreme Right politicians and political parties. The chapter concludes that the predominance of a security paradigm has shifted the baseline of values salience and realigned popular values and attitudes regarding immigration.

This chapter investigates how the International Organization for Migration (IOM) dramatically expanded its involvement in humanitarian emergencies over the past three decades. Building on insights from historical institutionalism in international relations, we hypothesize that crises which touch upon matters of migration may constitute opportunities for IOM to expand the range of its activities as contingencies call for flexible responses that the organization is (the only one) apt to deliver. The 1990-91 Gulf War served as a ‘critical juncture’ in this regard, where IOM started to expand more forcefully into the broad realm of humanitarian assistance. It set a precedent that served as best-practice example and led to an ex post formalization of the institutional expansion through corresponding frameworks for action. As we show in case studies of the 2011 Libyan civil war and the 2014-16 Ebola crisis, this pattern holds across a variety of crisis contexts: humanitarian emergencies expose gaps in the governance architecture that IOM is quick to fill, thereby increasing the range of its activities which is later normalized in institutional rules and practice. Today’s vast array of humanitarian and other crisis-related tasks fulfilled by IOM attest to the lasting ‘power of precedent’.

This first concluding chapter discusses the ways that social science literature has analyzed the legacies of colonial rule, and argues that colonial state-building may represent a more fruitful approach to analyzing complex regimes and their long-term consequences. It presents a discussion of the logic of historical legacies in relation to the comparative-historical framework of critical junctures and path dependency. It then discusses the drawbacks to dominant approaches that focus on causal inference in assessing colonial legacies.

The worldwide exportation of the nation-state went hand in hand with the diffusion of the Western concept of religion, both of which are notably related to the expansion of the Westphalian order. Exploring the diffusion of the twin concepts of nation-state and religion intersects with two bodies of knowledge: nationalism and secularization. Combining them helps explain why and how religion and politics influence each other. Historical institutionalism and conceptual history are used to establish areas of politicization of religion in the qualitative phase of the research and to identify patterns in big data bases in the quantitative phase of the research. This approach is applied to the politicization of religion in Syria, Turkey, India, China and Russia.

Four major forces played a role in determining whether a country moved rapidly in the transformation: historical legacy; reform commitment by leaders; the role of specialist technocrats; and external influences. This chapter addresses the historical legacies that affected the strategy and speed of transition, be they inertia or return to earlier history. While in general being closer to Western Europe and today’s European Union, or having a shorter history of communism tended to propel countries toward more rapid reforms, there were many exceptions on both sides of the divide. Thus, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Romania initially moved far more slowly. Farther east, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, and to some extent Armenia initially moved far faster on economic reforms that others in the USSR – although this was effort was soon aborted. The chapter also asks how related historical issues affected economic reform speed: the occurrence of wars or civil conflicts (Yugoslav republics, Armenia and Azerbaijan, and Tajikistan); and the role of nationalism – sometimes positive (the Baltics and Ukraine), sometimes negative (Armenia and Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Moldova).