ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the previous chapter. This chapter proceeds through detailed case studies, employing a broadly historical institutionalist approach. It illustrates that historical institutionalism can help bring such new causal mechanisms to light, but there is still much more work to be done and other methodologies will be required. In particular, there is a need to better understand the factors that shape diffuse forms of support and the evolution of preferences. While only touched upon in this conclusion, there is also a need to unpack spending and taxation. Deficits are often treated as a relatively abstract gap between the two. But as the chapters here show, there is significant variation in the kinds of spending as well as revenue, and each are embedded in very different institutional contexts and social logics that create specific kinds of political constraints.
