Transboundary crises as critical junctures

Sometimes a major crisis occurs that impacts a policy sector in a profound way. The literature on policy reform and institutional change assumes that such critical junctures break the barriers to reform. This paper would like to put this assumption to the test and analyze the effects of transboundary crises that qualify as a potential critical juncture for several countries simultaneously. In our paper the triggering events for fundamental structure and policy shifts are the 1986 Chernobyl disaster and the attack on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. This paper aims to compare the effects of these transboundary crises in the Netherlands, France and Germany in the policy domains (nuclear) energy policy after Chernobyl and security policy after 911. It will employ an event-history analysis of comparable datasets on the structure of government in each of these countries to see whether domain-specific government structures changed drastically in the years following the critical event. If exogenous shocks and critical junctures indeed lead to policy changes, we should see increased structural reform in specific policy domains after a transboundary crisis and find that these structural changes indeed indicate a shift in policy orientation.