Georg Menz

This new and comprehensive volume covering the subfield of comparative political economy provides a detailed overview over its intellectual roots, clarifies its contents, and introduces the readers to key debates while identifying new and exciting avenues for future research. Ideas, interests, and institutions have traditionally been the main focus points of this field, but the volume argues that culture provides an additional and often neglected area, providing the 'glue' that keeps national models of capitalism hanging together. The volume also develops pathways beyond the varieties of capitalism paradigm. Building on a thorough and rigorous review of comparative capitalisms and a synthesis of the research strands that have built the bedrock of this subfield, Comparative Political Economy explores the individual components of national models of capitalism and argues that these elements deserve closer scrutiny. Their permutations have been considerable over the past thirty years, and their study permits valuable insights both empirically and theoretically. The empirical coverage of the book includes chapters covering industrial relations, labour markets, systems of education and training, finance, welfare state, and debt. In the conclusion, research pathways forward are identified and the impact of energy security issues and environmental factors on the study of comparative capitalisms will be assessed.

This new and comprehensive volume covering the subfield of comparative political economy provides a detailed overview over its intellectual roots, clarifies its contents, and introduces the readers to key debates while identifying new and exciting avenues for future research. Ideas, interests, and institutions have traditionally been the main focus points of this field, but the volume argues that culture provides an additional and often neglected area, providing the 'glue' that keeps national models of capitalism hanging together. The volume also develops pathways beyond the varieties of capitalism paradigm. Building on a thorough and rigorous review of comparative capitalisms and a synthesis of the research strands that have built the bedrock of this subfield, Comparative Political Economy explores the individual components of national models of capitalism and argues that these elements deserve closer scrutiny. Their permutations have been considerable over the past thirty years, and their study permits valuable insights both empirically and theoretically. The empirical coverage of the book includes chapters covering industrial relations, labour markets, systems of education and training, finance, welfare state, and debt. In the conclusion, research pathways forward are identified and the impact of energy security issues and environmental factors on the study of comparative capitalisms will be assessed.

European governments have re-discovered labour migration, but are eager to be perceived as controlling unsolicited forms of migration, especially through asylum and family reunion. The emerging paradigm of managed migration combines the construction of more permissive channels for desirable and actively recruited labour migrants with ever more restrictive approaches towards asylum seekers. Non-state actors, especially employer organizations, trade unions, and humanitarian non-governmental organisations, attempt to shape regulatory measures, but their success varies depending on organizational characteristics. Labour market interest associations' lobbying strategies regarding quantities and skill profile of labour migrants will be influenced by the respective system of political economy they are embedded in. Trade unions are generally supportive of well-managed labour recruitment strategies. But migration policy-making also proceeds at the European Union (EU) level. While national actors seek to upload their national model as a blueprint for future EU policy to avoid costly adaptation, top-down Europeanization is re-casting national regulation in important ways, notwithstanding highly divergent national regulatory philosophies. Based on field work in and analysis of primary documents from six European countries (France, Italy, United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, and Poland) this book makes an important contribution to the study of a rapidly Europeanized policy domain. Combining insights from the literature on comparative political economy, Europeanization, and migration studies, the book makes important contributions to all three, while demonstrating how migration policy can be fruitfully studied by employing tools from mainstream political science, rather than treating it as a distinct subfield.

European governments have re-discovered labour migration, but are eager to be perceived as controlling unsolicited forms of migration, especially through asylum and family reunion. The emerging paradigm of managed migration combines the construction of more permissive channels for desirable and actively recruited labour migrants with ever more restrictive approaches towards asylum seekers. Non-state actors, especially employer organizations, trade unions, and humanitarian non-governmental organisations, attempt to shape regulatory measures, but their success varies depending on organizational characteristics. Labour market interest associations' lobbying strategies regarding quantities and skill profile of labour migrants will be influenced by the respective system of political economy they are embedded in. Trade unions are generally supportive of well-managed labour recruitment strategies. But migration policy-making also proceeds at the European Union (EU) level. While national actors seek to upload their national model as a blueprint for future EU policy to avoid costly adaptation, top-down Europeanization is re-casting national regulation in important ways, notwithstanding highly divergent national regulatory philosophies. Based on field work in and analysis of primary documents from six European countries (France, Italy, United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, and Poland) this book makes an important contribution to the study of a rapidly Europeanized policy domain. Combining insights from the literature on comparative political economy, Europeanization, and migration studies, the book makes important contributions to all three, while demonstrating how migration policy can be fruitfully studied by employing tools from mainstream political science, rather than treating it as a distinct subfield.

Europeanization has often been conceived as a top-down process, necessitating implementation and adjustment at the national level. However, Europeanization can also be conditioned by bottom-up national initiatives. While recent endeavors in comparative political economy have emphasized the resilience of coordinated market economies, few detailed empirical studies have examined to date exactly how different European systems of political-economic governance cope with and respond to an European impetus for liberalization. This original study of the impact of the EU-induced liberalization of service provision on member states argues that innovative national re-regulatory strategies may be implemented in response to Europeanization. In permitting any company registered in an EU member state to provide services throughout Europe, new possibilities were created for the transnational posting of workers from low-wage to high-wage countries. However, high-wage countries could re-regulate the wage levels applicable to such employees. The exact nature of such response strategy is coloured by the respective institutional power that labour market interest associations like trade unions and employer associations command. Therefore, different institutionalised varieties of capitalism generate distinct re-regulations of the Single European Market. Drawing on detailed case studies of ten European countries, this volume bridges the gap between the rapidly unfolding scholarly debate on Europeanization and varieties of capitalism. It argues that both strongly neocorporatist systems of political-economic governance and statist systems are capable of creating swift, comprehensive and thorough national re-regulations. This applies to Austria and France, but also Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Belgium, and Luxembourg. By contrast, countries with less strongly embedded neocorporatist structures, in which due to organizational deficiencies trade unions face difficulties blocking employer demands, create liberal response strategies, permitting a stratification of wage levels. Hence, both Germany and the Netherlands implemented liberal business-friendly re-regulations. The volume makes the case for important amendments to existing accounts of Europeanization and varieties of capitalism. Scholars of Europeanization need to incorporate bottom-up re-regulation into their conceptual framework, particularly in response to 'negative integration'. Recent strides in comparative political economy have placed great emphasis on continued divergence, yet this study suggests that even within the presumably unified group of 'non-liberal' coordinated market economies important institutional differences produce very distinct responses in the face of European liberalization.

This book explores how a wide range of countries attempt to cope with the challenges of globalization. While the internalization of globalization proceeds in significantly different ways, there is a broad process of convergence taking place around the politics of neoliberalism and a more market-oriented version of capitalism. The book examines how distinct social structures, political cultures, patterns of party and interest group politics, classes, public policies, liberal democratic and authoritarian institutions, and the discourses that frame them, are being reshaped by political actors. Chapters cover national experiences from Europe and North America to Asia and Latin America (Chile, Mexico, and Peru).