This book brings together a distinguished set of contributors from different disciplines to examine current theories of institutional change. Chapters highlight the limitations of these theories by demonstrating how contemporary political economies develop in incremental but cumulatively transformative processes. A wide, but not infinite, variety of models of institutional change emerges which can be meaningfully distinguished and analytically compared. The book offers an empirically grounded typology of modes of institutional change leading to important insights on mechanisms of social and political stability and evolution generally