The breakdown of political and economic regimes always offers new political actors opportunities to deal creatively with a highly contingent and open range of possibilities in order to craft new institutions and power relations. Nevertheless, the creativity of actors is also constrained by the experiences of the past and the patterns of economic and political resource distribution under the old regimes. Whereas historians are typically fascinated by the openness of choice in situations of regime breakdown and the idiosyncrasies of the actors who take advantage of them, sociologists and political scientists tend to focus more on the regularities and continuities that exercise a persistent influence on the pathways of social and political transformation in crisis situations, mediated by actors' rational pursuit of power, wealth, or ultimate cultural values. In this vein, the profound diversity of post-communist polities may not predominantly result from random variation of actors' choices when faced with the collapse of the existing communist political and economic regimes. Although regime breakdown may make some actors imagine an almost infinite range of choices among alternative new social and political orders, the former institutions and resource distributions, together with entrenched mutual expectations about likely or appropriate behavior generated under the old regime, still affect actors' aspirations and practical moves when building a new order and thus circumscribe the feasible set of outcomes.

Both historical legacies and actors' strategic choices matter in the pathdependent process of creating new polities and economies.