Introduction: institutional change in advanced political economies

"Empirically the chapters of this book deal with current changes in selected political-economic institutions of rich, mostly Western democracies. To us the most prominent theoretical frameworks employed in the analysis of the welfare state and of contemporary political economy generally seem singularly ill-equipped to capture significant developments underway in many if not all of them. While we join with a large literature that rejects the notion that previously diverse political economies are all covering on a single model of capitalism, we notice that many arguments in support of the idea of distinctive and stable national models lack the analytic tools necessary to capture the changes that are indisputably going on in these countries. One consequence is a tendency in the literature to understate the extent of change, or alternatively to code all observed changes as minor adaptive adjustments to altered circumstances in the service of continuous reproduction of existing systems." (excerpt

Historical-institutionalist perspectives on the development of the EU budget system

The EU budget has only recently started to feature in theories of European integration. Studies typically adopt a historical-institutionalist framework, exploring notions such as path dependency. They have, however, generally been rather aggregated, or coarse-grained, in their approach. The EU budget has thus been treated as a single entity rather than a series of inter-linked institutions. This paper seeks to address these lacunae by adopting a fine-grained approach. This enables us to emphasize the connections that exist between EU budgetary institutions, in both time and space. We show that the initial set of budgetary institutions was unable, over time, to achieve consistently their treaty-based objectives. In response, rather than reform these institutions at potentially high political cost, additional institutions were layered on top of the extant structures. We thus demonstrate how some EU budgetary institutions have remained unchanged, whilst others have been added or changed over time

Economic integration and state responses : change in European industrial relations since Maastricht

The article analyses industrial relations change in the six largest EU countries since 1992 in relation to increased internationalisation pressures. Based on qualitative and quantitative analysis, it distinguishes between associational and state governance, and detects that despite a predominant, but not universal, trend of weakening trade unions and collective bargaining, no overall liberalisation has occurred in the political regulation of employment (employment policies, welfare state, labour law, state support to collective bargaining, public sector). Rather than as converging towards neoliberalism, industrial relations emerge as more politically contingent and dependent on multiple forms of power, which are affected by internationalisation in different ways

Power and changing modes of governance in the euro crisis

Which European Union actors are most powerful in the governance of the euro crisis? The euro crisis has reignited the classic debate between intergovernmentalists, who tend to stress the coercive power of dominant member states in the European Council, and supranationalists, who maintain that through the use of institutional power, the Commission, and the European Central Bank turned out the “winners” of the crisis. This article argues that euro crisis governance is best understood not just in terms of one form of power but instead as evolving through different constellations of coercive, institutional, and ideational power that favored different EU actors over the course of the crisis, from the initial fast-burning phase (2010–2012), where the coercive and ideational power of Northern European member states in the European Council was strongest, to the slow-burning phase (2012–2016), when greater influence was afforded supranational actors through the use of ideational and institutional power.Horizon 2020 Framework Programme; ENLIGHTEN-European Legitimacy in GoverningHorizon 2020 Framework Programme, ENLIGHTEN–European Legitimacy in Governin

A comparative framework: how broadly applicable is a 'rigorous' critical junctures framework?

The paper tests Hogan and Doyle's (2007, 2008) framework for examining critical junctures. This framework sought to incorporate the concept of ideational change in understanding critical junctures. Until its development, frameworks utilized in identifying critical junctures were subjective, seeking only to identify crisis, and subsequent policy changes, arguing that one invariably led to the other, as both occurred around the same time. Hogan and Doyle (2007, 2008) hypothesized ideational change as an intermediating variable in their framework, determining if, and when, a crisis leads to radical policy change. Here we test this framework on cases similar to, but different from, those employed in developing the exemplar. This will enable us determine whether the framework's relegation of ideational change to a condition of crisis holds, or, if ideational change has more importance than is ascribed to it by this framework. This will also enable us determined if the framework itself is robust, and fit for the purposes it was designed to perform — identifying the nature of policy change

Historical institutionalism and the politics of sustainable energy transitions: a research agenda

Improving the understanding of the politics of sustainable energy transitions has become a major focus for research. This paper builds on recent interest in institutionalist approaches to consider in some depth the agenda arising from a historical institutionalist perspective on such transitions. It is argued that historical institutionalism is a valuable complement to socio-technical systems approaches, offering tools for the explicit analysis of institutional dynamics that are present but implicit in the latter framework, opening up new questions and providing useful empirical material relevant for the study of the wider political contexts within which transitions are emerging. Deploying a number of core concepts including veto players, power, unintended consequences, and positive and negative feedback in a variety of ways, the paper explores research agendas in two broad areas: understanding diversity in transition outcomes in terms of the effects of different institutional arrangements, and the understanding of transitions in terms of institutional development and change. A range of issues are explored, including: the roles of electoral and political institutions, regulatory agencies, the creation of politically credible commitment to transition policies, power and incumbency, institutional systems and varieties of capitalism, sources of regime stability and instability, policy feedback effects, and types of gradual institutional change. The paper concludes with some observations on the potential and limitations of historical institutionalism, and briefly considers the question of whether there may be specific institutional configurations that would facilitate more rapid sustainable energy transitions

Comparative Capitalism without Capitalism, and Production without Workers: The Limits and Possibilities of Contemporary Institutional Analysis

The aim of this paper is to consider the extent to which the comparative capitalism literature fully reflects the available empirical evidence in its attempts to model different versions of capitalism and, in particular, whether it adequately captures the roles of diverse stakeholders within the capitalist system. In doing so, particular attention is accorded to the varieties of capitalism literature, business systems theory and regulation theory. In addition, there is reflection in the paper on whether any strand of the literature is able to deal effectively with the recent economic crisis and systemic change. It is argued that more attention needs to be devoted to exploring the structural causes of change and the marginalization of the interests of key social groupings, most notably workers, from the process of institutional redesign

Globalization, multinationals and institutional diversity

This article aims to explore the impact of globalization and in particular multinationals on diversity within national varieties of capitalism. Do the actions of multinationals create more diversity within national systems, do they reduce diversity or do they have relatively little impact on diversity within national systems? The article argues that there are distinctive structures of institutional diversity across different national systems. Therefore, the question is not how do MNCs impact on institutional diversity per se but how do they impact on these different structures of diversity? In order to develop this argument, the paper also differentiates types of multinational. The article uses distinction between market-seeking, resource-seeking, efficiency-seeking and strategic asset-seeking in order to identify a range of different MNC activity across manufacturing, professional and financial sectors. These different sorts of MNC activity vary across time and contexts in terms of their significance. The article looks in detail at four different models of capitalism and examines how the entry of different sorts of multinationals with distinctive objectives impacts on the relationships between key social actors which underpin and reinforce these models. In this way, it suggests how institutional diversity within different types of capitalism may evolve under the impact of MNCs and globalization