Download or read book The Effects of Political Institutions on Varieties of Capitalism written by Matthew P. Arsenault and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-02-10 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book identifies and explores the mechanisms linking political institutions and variation in capitalist systems. A strong correlation exists between varieties of political regimes and varieties of capitalism: majoritarian political regimes are correlated with liberal market economies (LMEs) and consensus political regimes are correlated with coordinated market economies (CMEs). Still, correlation is not causation. Empirical findings illustrate that partisanship and policy legacies, the number of political parties, electoral rules, and constitutional constraints are significant indicators of LMEs and CMEs. Arsenault finds that majoritarian institutions create an environment of adversarial politics and strong competition between actors, which makes credible commitment to nonmarket coordination mechanisms unlikely. Consensus institutions, on the other hand, promote an atmosphere of cooperation and coordination between actors, thus encouraging credible commitment to nonmarket coordination mechanisms. Qualitative case studies of Germany, Britain, and New Zealand confirm the quantitative findings and suggest that political regimes were instrumental in shaping the economic adjustment paths of these countries during the era of liberalization in the 1980s.

Download or read book Varieties of Capitalism written by Peter A. Hall and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 557 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Applying the new economics of organisation and relational theories of the firm to the problem of understanding cross-national variation in the political economy, this volume elaborates a new understanding of the institutional differences that characterise the 'varieties of capitalism' worldwide.

Download or read book Varieties of Capitalism written by Peter A. Hall and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2001-08-30 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are the most fundamental differences among the political economies of the developed world? How do national institutional differences condition economic performance, public policy, and social well-being? Will they survive the pressures for convergence generated by globalization and technological change? These have long been central questions in comparative political economy. This book provides a new and coherent set of answers to them. Building on the new economics of organization, the authors develop an important new theory about which differences among national political economies are most significant for economic policy and performance. Drawing on a distinction between 'liberal' and 'coordinated' market economies, they argue that there is more than one path to economic success. Nations need not converge to a single Anglo-American model. They develop a new theory of 'comparative institutionaladvantage' that transforms our understanding of international trade, offers new explanations for the response of firms and nations to the challenges of globalization, and provides a new theory of national interest to explain the conduct of nations in international relations. The analysis brings the firm back into the centre of comparative political economy. It provides new perspectives on economic and social policy-making that illuminate the role of business in the development of the welfare state and the dilemmas facing those who make economic policy in the contemporary world. Emphasizing the 'institutional complementarities' that link labour relations, corporate finance, and national legal systems, the authors bring interdisciplinary perspectives to bear on issues of strategic management, economic performance, and institutional change. This pathbreaking work sets new agendas in the study of comparative political economy. As such, it will be of value to academics and graduate students in economics, business, and political science, as well as to many others with interests in international relations, social policy-making, and the law.

Download or read book Re Forming Capitalism written by Wolfgang Streeck and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2010-03-04 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wolfgang Streeck has written extensively on comparative political economy and institutional theory. In this book he addresses some of the key issues in this field: the role of history in institutional analysis, the dynamics of slow institutional change, the limitations of rational design and economic-functionalist explanations of institutional stability, and the recurrent difficulties of restraining the effects of capitalism on social order. In the classification of the 'Varieties of Capitalism' school, Germany has always been taken as the chief exemplar of a 'European', coordinated market economy. Streeck explores to what extent Germany actually conforms to this description. His argument is supported by original empirical research on wage-setting and wage structure, the organization of business and labor in business associations and trade unions, social policy, public finance, and corporate governance. From this evidence, Bringing Capitalism Back In traces the current liberalization of the postwar economy of democratic capitalism by means of an historically-grounded approach to institutional change. This is an important book in comparative political economy and key reading across the social sciences for academics, researchers, and advanced students of Political Economy, Sociology, comparative business systems.

Download or read book Political Capitalism written by Randall G. Holcombe and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-19 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Problems associated with cronyism, corporatism, and policies that favor the elite over the masses have received increasing attention in recent years. Political Capitalism explains that what people often view as the result of corruption and unethical behavior are symptoms of a distinct system of political economy. The symptoms of political capitalism are often viewed as the result of government intervention in a market economy, or as attributes of a capitalist economy itself. Randall G. Holcombe combines well-established theories in economics and the social sciences to show that political capitalism is not a mixed economy, or government intervention in a market economy, or some intermediate step between capitalism and socialism. After developing the economic theory of political capitalism, Holcombe goes on to explain how changes in political ideology have facilitated the growth of political capitalism, and what can be done to redirect public policy back toward the public interest.

Download or read book Institutions Institutional Change and Economic Performance written by Douglass C. North and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1990-10-26 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An analytical framework for explaining the ways in which institutions and institutional change affect the performance of economies is developed in this analysis of economic structures.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of French Politics written by Robert Elgie and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 753 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of French Politics provides a comprehensive and comparative overview of the French political system through the lens of political science. The Handbook is organized into three parts: the first part identifies foundational concepts for the French case, including chapters on republicanism and social welfare; the second part focuses on thematic large-scale processes, such identity, governance, and globalization; while the third part examines a wide range of issues relating to substantive politics and policy, among which are chapters on political representation, political culture, social movements, economic policy, gender policy, and defense and security policy. The volume brings together established and emerging scholars and seeks to examine the French political system from a comparative perspective. The contributors provide a state-of-the-art review both of the comparative scholarly literature and the study of the French case, making The Oxford Handbook of French Politics an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the foundations of contemporary political life in France.

Download or read book Debating Varieties of Capitalism written by Bob Hancké and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2009-09-03 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peter Hall and David Soskice's Varieties of Capitalism has become a seminal text and reference point across the social sciences, generating debate and research around political-economic models. Here, Bob Hancké presents the key readings on 'Varieties of Capitalism', including the original Hall and Soskice introduction, which encompass the key issues in the study of capitalism and capitalist diversity, its origins, and the debates that followed it. Beginning with the broad theoretical arguments around the idea of 'Varieties of Capitalism', the book then goes on to focus on specific empirical controversies, before finally considering recent attempts at rethinking this influential framework. The Debating Varieties of Capitalism Reader is the perfect guide to understanding this set of ideas that have changed the way we look at comparative political economy.

Download or read book Seeking the Best Master written by Miklós Szanyi and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-01 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The economic crisis of 2008–2009 signaled the end of the Post-Washington Consensus on restricting the role of the state in economic and development policy. Since then, state ownership and state intervention have increased worldwide. This volume offers a comparative analysis of the evolution of direct state intervention in the economy through state-owned companies in Austria, Brazil, France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Singapore, and Slovenia. Each case study includes substantial explanations of historical, cultural, and institutional contexts. All the contributors point to the complex nature of the current revival in state economic interventions. The few models that are successful cannot hide the potential problems of excessive state intervention, linked to high levels of moral hazard. State-owned enterprises are primary tools of market and price manipulation for political purposes. They can be used outright for rent seeking. Yet state-owned enterprises can also play important roles in prestigious national initiatives, like major public works or high-profile social and sports events. The authors conclude that after the uniform application of democratic market economic principles, the 2000s witnessed a path-dependent departure from standard economic and political operating procedures in developed countries.

Download or read book Varieties of Liberalization and the New Politics of Social Solidarity written by Kathleen Thelen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-31 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines contemporary changes in labor market institutions in the United States, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands, focusing on developments in three arenas - industrial relations, vocational education and training, and labor market policy. While confirming a broad, shared liberalizing trend, it finds that there are in fact distinct varieties of liberalization associated with very different distributive outcomes. Most scholarship equates liberal capitalism with inequality and coordinated capitalism with higher levels of social solidarity. However, this study explains why the institutions of coordinated capitalism and egalitarian capitalism coincided and complemented one another in the "Golden Era" of postwar development in the 1950s and 1960s, and why they no longer do so. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, this study reveals that the successful defense of the institutions traditionally associated with coordinated capitalism has often been a recipe for increased inequality due to declining coverage and dualization. Conversely, it argues that some forms of labor market liberalization are perfectly compatible with continued high levels of social solidarity and indeed may be necessary to sustain it.

Download or read book The Diversity of Modern Capitalism written by Bruno Amable and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2003-12-04 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book considers why institutional forms of modern capitalist economies differ internationally, and proposes a typology of capitalism based on the theory of institutional complementarity. Different economic models are not simply characterized by different institutional forms, but also by particular patterns of interaction between complementary institutions which are the core characteristics of these models. Institutions are not just simply devices which would be chosen by 'social engineers' in order to perform a function as efficiently as possible; they are the outcome of a political economy process. Therefore, institutional change should be envisaged not as a move towards a hypothetical 'one best way', but as a result of socio-political compromises. Based on a theory of institutions and comparative capitalism, the book proposes an analysis of the diversity of modern economies - from America to Korea - and identifies five different models: the market-based Anglo-Saxon model; Asian capitalism; the Continental European model; the social democratic economies; and the Mediterranean model. Each of these types of capitalism is characterized by specific institutional complementarities. The question of the stability of the Continental European model of capitalism has been open since the beginning of the 1990s: inferior macroeconomic performance compared to Anglo-Saxon economies, alleged unsustainability of its welfare systems, too rigid markets, etc. The book examines the institutional transformations that have taken place within Continental European economies and analyses the political project behind the attempts at transforming the Continental model. It argues that Continental European economies will most likely stay very different from the market-based economies, and caat political strategies promoting institutional change aiming at convergence with the Anglo-Saxon model are bound to meet considerable opposition.

Download or read book Market Liberalism and Economic Patriotism in the Capitalist World System written by Tamás Gerőcs and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-02-06 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume broadens the scope of 'comparative capitalism' within the Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) tradition. It endorses the employment of multiple perspectives, including critical political economy, institutionalist systems of capitalism, structuralist-dependency scholarship and world-systems theory. The contributors deal with the theory of economic patriotism in a conceptual framework, as well as case studies regarding rent-seeking behaviour, the patronage state in Hungary and Poland, the conflict between national regulation and the European legal framework and the perspective of wage relations in the European institutional framework. The book concludes with the legacy of developmentalism and dirigisme in a core-periphery relation, based on the French state and a range of non-European cases including Iran, Brazil and Egypt.

Download or read book Capitalist Diversity on Europe s Periphery written by Dorothee Bohle and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-15 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the collapse of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance in 1991, the Eastern European nations of the former socialist bloc had to figure out their newly capitalist future. Capitalism, they found, was not a single set of political-economic relations. Rather, they each had to decide what sort of capitalist nation to become. In Capitalist Diversity on Europe's Periphery, Dorothee Bohle and Béla Geskovits trace the form that capitalism took in each country, the assets and liabilities left behind by socialism, the transformational strategies embraced by political and technocratic elites, and the influence of transnational actors and institutions. They also evaluate the impact of three regional shocks: the recession of the early 1990s, the rolling global financial crisis that started in July 1997, and the political shocks that attended EU enlargement in 2004.Bohle and Greskovits show that the postsocialist states have established three basic variants of capitalist political economy: neoliberal, embedded neoliberal, and neocorporatist. The Baltic states followed a neoliberal prescription: low controls on capital, open markets, reduced provisions for social welfare. The larger states of central and eastern Europe (Poland, Hungary, and the Czech and Slovak republics) have used foreign investment to stimulate export industries but retained social welfare regimes and substantial government power to enforce industrial policy. Slovenia has proved to be an outlier, successfully mixing competitive industries and neocorporatist social inclusion. Bohle and Greskovits also describe the political contention over such arrangements in Romania, Bulgaria, and Croatia. A highly original and theoretically sophisticated typology of capitalism in postsocialist Europe, this book is unique in the breadth and depth of its conceptually coherent and empirically rich comparative analysis.

Download or read book Varietals of Capitalism written by Xabier Itçaina and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2016-02-01 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Varietals of Capitalism shows that politics is an omnipresent part of the economics of wine and of economic activity in general. Based on a four-year research project encompassing fieldwork in France, Spain, Italy, and Romania, Xabier Itçaina, Antoine Roger, and Andy Smith examine the causes and effects of a radical reform adopted at the EU level in 2008. Regulatory change politically transformed the rationale of EU support to the wine industry, from shaping the supply side to encouraging producers to adapt to the demands of a supposedly "new consumer."To explain the adoption and impact of the reform, the authors develop an analytical framework to capture the actors—their perceptions, preferences, and interdependencies—within an industry crisscrossed by institutions located at the global, European, national, and local scales. This framework combines concepts and lessons from historical institutionalism and regulationist economics, Bourdieu's field theory, and the sociology of public policymaking. The authors reject accounts that attribute policy change simply to material determinants and "the invisible hand of the market." They emphasize the crucial importance of institutions within sectors of the economy, and propose ways to bolster constructivist approaches to political economy by linking industrial change to scientific and bureaucratic balances of power. This book’s novel focus on different levels of institutional impact should prove influential in the study of the politics of industry, and more broadly within the comparative analysis of capitalism.

Download or read book The Political Economy Reader written by Naazneen Barma and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This reader combines, in a single volume, the key writings of classical and contemporary thinkers on political economy, providing both a theoretical approach to understanding capitalism and a survey of the varieties of capitalism around the world today.

Download or read book Mediterranean Capitalism Revisited written by Luigi Burroni and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-15 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mediterranean Capitalism Revisited brings together leading experts on the political economies of southern Europe—specifically Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal—to closely analyze and explain the primary socioeconomic and institutional features that define "Mediterranean capitalism" within the wider European context. These economies share a number of features, most notably their difficulties to provide viable answers to the challenge of globalization. By examining and comparing such components as welfare, education and innovation policies, cultural dimensions, and labor market regulation, Mediterranean Capitalism Revisited attends to both commonalities and divergences between the four countries, identifying the main reasons behind the poor performance of their economies and slow recovery from the Great Recession of 2007–2008. This volume also sheds light on the process of diversification among the four countries and addresses whether it did and still does make sense to speak of a uniquely Mediterranean model of capitalism. Contributors: Alexandre Afonso, Leiden University; Lucio Baccaro, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies; Rui Branco, NOVA University of Lisbon; Fabio Bulfone, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies; Giliberto Capano, University of Bologna; Sabrina Colombo, University of Milan; Lisa Dorigatti, University of Milan; Ana M. Guillén, University of Oviedo; Matteo Jessoula, University of Milan; Andrea Lippi, University of Florence; Manos Matsaganis, Polytechnic University of Milan; Oscar Molina, Autonomous University of Barcelona; Manuela Moschella, Scuola Normale Superiore; Sofia A. Pérez, Boston University; Gemma Scalise, University of Bergamo; Arianna Tassinari, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies.

Download or read book Democratic Capitalism at the Crossroads written by Carles Boix and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-28 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An incisive history of the changing relationship between democracy and capitalism The twentieth century witnessed the triumph of democratic capitalism in the industrialized West, with widespread popular support for both free markets and representative elections. Today, that political consensus appears to be breaking down, disrupted by polarization and income inequality, widespread dissatisfaction with democratic institutions, and insurgent populism. Tracing the history of democratic capitalism over the past two centuries, Carles Boix explains how we got here—and where we could be headed. Boix looks at three defining stages of capitalism, each originating in a distinct time and place with its unique political challenges, structure of production and employment, and relationship with democracy. He begins in nineteenth-century Manchester, where factory owners employed unskilled laborers at low wages, generating rampant inequality and a restrictive electoral franchise. He then moves to Detroit in the early 1900s, where the invention of the modern assembly line shifted labor demand to skilled blue-collar workers. Boix shows how growing wages, declining inequality, and an expanding middle class enabled democratic capitalism to flourish. Today, however, the information revolution that began in Silicon Valley in the 1970s is benefitting the highly educated at the expense of the traditional working class, jobs are going offshore, and inequality has risen sharply, making many wonder whether democracy and capitalism are still compatible. Essential reading for these uncertain times, Democratic Capitalism at the Crossroads proposes sensible policy solutions that can help harness the unruly forces of capitalism to preserve democracy and meet the challenges that lie ahead.