As Long As it Takes: Duration and the Explanation of Political Outcomes.

Analysts working from a variety of perspectives have stressed the importance of focusing on how social development occurs over time, and how the temporal relationships among variables can have profound effects on their interactions. Discussions of path dependence, timing and sequence, long-term processes, and issues related to institutional development have proliferated. Issues of duration ? the length of time over which particular changes in a variable or variables of interest are produced ? appear repeatedly in this literature, but this feature of social processes has so far received little direct attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]