Combining New Institutionalisms: Explaining Institutional Change in American Property Insurance

This article combines institutionalisms to explain fundamental change in American property insurance. During the 1950s, the industry shifted from associations to price-competitive markets and vertically integrated firms. I advance two new arguments to explain this shift: First, institutions endogenously generate conditions for change. Second, fundamental change or institutional replacement depends on a dynamic convergence of conditions—market failures, legitimacy crises, new models of order—and the culmination of this dynamic in politics and policies that admit alternatives into fields. Together, these arguments reduce indeterminacies in existing theories of change and shed new light on punctuated equilibria and the politics of transformation.