Sociology Department Colloquium: Paul Starr

"Entrenchment: Power, Policy, Structure"

Paul Starr is professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University and Stuart Professor of communications and public affairs at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School. He is also co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect. During the 2014-15 academic year, he is a fellow at Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Among his books are The Social Transformation of American Medicine (1983), which won the Bancroft Prize (American History), C. Wright Mills Award (Sociology), and Pulitzer Prize (General Nonfiction); The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (2004), which received the Goldsmith Book Prize; Freedom's Power: The History and Promise of Liberalism (2007); and Remedy and Reaction: The Peculiar American Struggle over Health-Care Reform (2011, revised ed. 2013). He is currently working on a project on the entrenchment of power, law, and social structure, as well as a book about unanticipated changes in the development of post-industrial societies.

Abstract:

“Entrenchment” refers to forms of change that are hard to reverse. Constitutional entrenchment, for example, involves writing a rule into a constitution so as to make it hard to change. Many other examples of entrenchment develop as unplanned, path-dependent byproducts of decisions or as the result of a combination of deliberate actions and processes beyond any actors’ control. Different terms for entrenchment are used in different contexts—“lock in,” for example, in regard to technologies and markets; “consolidation,” in regard to political regimes. Entrenchment overlaps institutionalization, but two are not the same: some things are institutionalized without being entrenched, while others are entrenched without being institutionalized. Entrenchment may also vary according to the actors: some things are entrenched from the standpoint of all actors, while others are entrenched only from the perspective of some.

I will set out an analytical framework for understanding mechanisms of entrenchment and then focus on a series of historical cases of the entrenchment of power and policy in democracies, where, in principle, power and policy are supposed to be reversible.