Weak and Strong Path Dependency

There has been a lot of discussion in the social sciences about critical junctures, crucial events in history, how the past shapes the present including noting that some choices in the past coagulate into institutions that are sticky and condition choices in the present. The problem with the current theoretical analysis of history and path dependency is that the discussion has inadvertently been set up with a false dichotomy. Either (a) the impact of a particular point earlier in the past is as important as or more important than points less distant in the past, or (b) the past doesn’t matter at all (ahistorical). There is a third possibility that I argue conforms to what people really mean by the term path dependent and stickyness and that is more consistent with the empirical evidence. In the third possibility, the impact of the past matters in the present, but events farther in the past have less impact than events in the more recent past, and events in the more recent past have more impact than events in the far past but less than events in the present. This paper examines a model that exhibits this last characteristic and explores the implications of the model to path dependent social explanations.