The Politics of Advanced Capitalism

Description

This book serves as a sequel to two distinguished volumes on capitalism: Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism (Cambridge, 1999) and Order and Conflict in Contemporary Capitalism (1985). Both volumes took stock of major economic challenges advanced industrial democracies faced, as well as the ways political and economic elites dealt with them. However, during the last decades, the structural environment of advanced capitalist democracies has undergone profound changes: sweeping deindustrialization, tertiarization of the employment structure, and demographic developments. This book provides a synthetic view, allowing the reader to grasp the nature of these structural transformations and their consequences in terms of the politics of change, policy outputs, and outcomes. In contrast to functionalist and structuralist approaches, the book advocates and contributes to a 'return of electoral and coalitional politics' to political economy research.

Pablo Beramendi is Associate Professor of Political Science at Duke University, North Carolina. He is the author of The Political Geography of Inequality (Cambridge, 2013), winner of the 2013 APSA Best Book Award from the European Politics and Society section and 2014 Honorable Mention recipient of the APSA Luebbert Best Book Award. Silja Hausermann is Professor of Political Science at the University of Zurich. She is the author of The Politics of Welfare Reform in Continental Europe: Modernization in Hard Times (Cambridge, 2010). Herbert Kitschelt is George V. Allen Professor of International Relations at Duke University, North Carolina. His recent publications include Latin American Party Systems (coauthored, Cambridge, 2010) and Patrons, Clients, and Policies (coedited, Cambridge, 2007). Hanspeter Kriesi holds the Stein Rokkan Chair in Comparative Politics at the European University Institute in Florence. From 2005 to 2012, he served as director of a Swiss national research program on the challenges to democracy in the twenty-first century.

'This book offers the most compelling single-volume treatment to date of the evolution of advanced democratic capitalism and its subtypes. It provides state-of-the-art analysis of the character of postindustrial changes, their impact on cleavages and citizen preferences, and how parties fashion winning postindustrial political coalitions behind particular paths of adjustment. In doing so, Beramendi and colleagues reject functionalist and structuralist explanations of contemporary change and highlight the centrality of coalition building, partisan competition, and electoral politics for understanding the trajectories of advanced nations. The book concludes with an insightful examination of the consequences of particular paths of postindustrial policy adaption for economic outcomes, equality, and life satisfaction as well as the impact of recent economic crises on advanced capitalism. It is a superb contribution.' Duane Swank, President of the APSA Organized Section on Comparative Politics, Marquette University, Wisconsin 'An excellent contribution to the important topic of comparing country responses to the economic turbulences of recent times: how models about power resources, path dependence, and power alignments can make senses out of divergence/convergence on inequality, unemployment, growth, mobility, gender, health, and education. Faced with the decline of manufacturing, the globalization of the supply chain, and the shrinking of low-wage manufacturing, countries use their investments in the various institutions of capitalism in differing ways. This book helps us understand this variance and is valuable for faculty and students alike.' Peter Gourevitch, School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, University of California, San Diego