Bringing the political system (back) into social tipping relevant to sustainability

Recently, social tipping dynamics relevant to sustainability have become the subject of a rich literature. Numerous publications seek to bring the concept of tipping (back) from the natural to the social system and make important contributions to its conceptualization, definition, and constant refinement. Despite its wide array, the current literature has a blind spot: it does not adequately integrate, conceptualize, and measure the role of the political sphere and thus underestimates its importance for social tipping processes. This is the starting point of our contribution, which not only emphasizes the political dimension’s relevance to the analysis of social tipping, but also proposes two main ways to integrate it into such analyses: by conceptualizing the political sphere either as a trigger of social tipping, or as an element that can tip itself. Moreover, to capture the complexity of the political sphere, namely the interaction between networks, actors, and processes, we suggest analysing the political sphere along its three elements: polity, politics, and policy. Finally, we also discuss the main challenges to measuring and empirically testing social tipping in the political sphere.