The present volume is a sequel to two distinguished predecessors. Sixteen years have gone by since the publication of Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism (1999), itself a follow-up to the earlier Order and Conflict in Contemporary Capitalism (1984). Both volumes took stock of major economic challenges advanced industrial democracies faced, as well as the ways political and economic elites understood and dealt with them by building institutions and enacting policies that ultimately shaped citizens’ quality of life. But capitalism and democracy have not stood still. During the last decades,the structural environment of advanced capitalist democracies has undergone profound changes,linked most importantly to sweeping deindustrialization, accelerated tertiarization of the employment structure, and demographic developments. These changes have been accelerated and accentuated by the Great Recession, but their implications for the politics, policy strategies,and outcomes across advanced capitalist democracies can only be understood in
a longer time horizon, which is the perspective we have adopted in this volume. Along the way, the analytical
toolkit to understand these changes has gained in sophistication, complexity, and precision since the earlier volumes on which we build. New realities ask for new analytical tools and a periodic revision of the basic framework to understand cross-national differences and changes over time.
The present volume sets out to analyze the dynamics of contemporary advanced capitalism in the footsteps of the two earlier volumes. Our goal as editors has been to provide a synthetic view allowing the reader to grasp the nature of the current transformations. The volume is guided by a heuristic framework that takes as its point of departure the context of the structural transformations and proceeds to the politics of change, which, in turn, account for the governments’ policy outputs and, ultimately, lead to outcomes that, on their part, contribute to the transformation of society. In developing this framework, this volume is intended to advocate and contribute to a return of politics to political economy research. We put an emphasis on electoral and coalitional politics – understood as the dynamics of constrained policy choices. We understand policy choices (and changes thereof) as the fundamental tool to form and sustain political coalitions in a multidimensional policy space against the background of changing voter preferences. We believe that our model of constrained partisanship sheds light on the complexity of partisan coalition formation in advanced capitalist democracies.
This book has been long in coming. It was more than five years ago, in September 2009, that the four of us met for the first preparatory meeting in a small and remote mountain village in the Grisons, Switzerland, where we brainstormed about our heuristic scheme and drew up an agenda for this volume. We then invited scholars whose work has focused on these issues to join us in our endeavor to study the politics of advanced capitalism. Two conferences,one organized at the University of Zurich in June 2011 and a follow-up conference
at Duke University in October 2012,drew together the prospective contributors to this volume. On several other occasions, the draft chapters have been discussed with a large number of colleagues, in particular at the CES conference in June 2013 in Amsterdam, where the organizers generously granted us two sessions to present and discuss chapters from the project. Finally, the four of us met for a last round of work at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence in May 2013 to discuss what has now become the long Introduction to this volume.