This panel examines how national pasts, traditions and legacies have shaped a variety of institutional and policy outcomes during the crisis.  Several papers emphasize the significance of cross-case variation in the pathway followed from authoritarianism to democracy in the 1970s but many other elements of the past are also examined in these papers. These other facets of the past include elements of countries’ experiences under dictatorship and a variety of other factors as well.  The types of outcomes examined here include the nature of national welfare states, legal structures and practices including those that determine how states treat various forms of protest and conflict, economic policies and the behavior of national financial institutions and a wide array of distributional effects shaped by these and other institutional or policy choices.  The participants include scholars in political science, sociology and legal studies.