Historical institutionalist research has long struggled to come to terms with agency. Yet injecting agency into historical-institutionalist accounts is no easy task. If institutions are structuring agents’ actions, while they are simultaneously being structured by these very agents’ behavior, the ontological status of institutions remains unclear. Hence, most historical-institutional accounts, at the conceptual level, tend to downplay the role of agency. However, in this way, they also remain incomplete. Following the “coalitional turn” in historical institutionalism, we develop a new account of institutional change and stability that awards a central role to agency. At the heart of our approach is the notion that both stability and change in institutions presuppose constant coalition building by organized entrepreneurial actors. However, for several reasons, such coalition building is complicated, which ultimately leads to institutional stability. In addition, we argue that relevant state agencies actively shape whether the incumbent coalition or the challenger coalition prevails. We illustrate the potential of our actor-centered approach to institutional change by analyzing the reform of commercial training in Switzerland, tracing developments from the beginning of the 1980s until today.

中文翻译：

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代理人如何改变机构：联盟动态和瑞士商业培训改革

长期以来，历史制度主义研究一直在努力与代理达成协议。然而，将代理注入历史制度主义账户并非易事。如果制度正在构建代理人的行为，同时它们也同时被这些代理人的行为所建构，那么制度的本体论地位仍然不清楚。因此，在概念层面上，大多数历史制度解释倾向于淡化代理的作用。但是，通过这种方式，它们也仍然是不完整的。在历史制度主义的“联盟转向”之后，我们对制度变迁和稳定性提出了一种新的解释，赋予代理权一个核心作用。我们方法的核心是这样一种观念，即制度的稳定性和变化都以有组织的企业家行为者不断建立联盟为前提。然而，由于几个原因，这种联盟的建立是复杂的，最终导致制度稳定。此外，我们认为相关的国家机构积极影响现任联盟或挑战者联盟是否占上风。我们通过分析瑞士的商业培训改革，追溯从 1980 年代初到今天的发展，展示了我们以行动者为中心的制度变革方法的潜力。