Sequel to Distinguished Volumes on Capitalism

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.

Profound Changes in the Structural Environment

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.

Focus and Contributions of the Book

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.