How (and Why) Is This Time Different? The Politics of Economic Crisis in Western Europe and the United States

Abstract

This article compares government responses to the Great Recession of [2008][2009] with government responses to recessions and other economic challenges in the period 1974-1982. We focus on five countries: France, Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Across these countries, we observe two broad shifts in crisis responses. First, governments have in the recent period eschewed heterodox crisis policies and relied more exclusively on fiscal stimulus. Second, tax cuts have become a more important component of fiscal stimulus while spending cuts have featured more prominently in governments' efforts to consolidate their fiscal position. We argue that crisis responses reflect the interests and power of domestic actors as well as external constraints and the nature of the economic problems at hand. 13 Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci. 2012.15:13-33. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org by Harvard University on 09/02/14. For personal use only.The Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application aims to inform statisticians and quantitative methodologists, as well as all scientists and users of statistics about major methodological advances and the computational tools that allow for their implementation. It will include developments in the field of statistics, including theoretical statistical underpinnings of new methodology, as well as developments in specific application domains such as biostatistics and bioinformatics, economics, machine learning, psychology, sociology, and aspects of the physical sciences.Complimentary online access to the first volume will be available until January 2015. table of contents:

Path dependency and convergence of three worlds of welfare policy during the Great Recession: UK, Germany and Sweden

“…Chung & Thewissen, 2011;Lallement, 2011) and those who emphasize convergence (e.g. Pontusson & Raess, 2012;Shahidi, 2015) and pointing at the strengthening of neoliberal policy agendas across Europe (Hermann 2014). Our interview analysis showed how the Great Recessions triggered reactions in labour and social welfare policy which are highly path dependent, but sit within a broader framework of (neoliberal) convergence.…”

“…http://www.livewhat.unige.ch/ fundamental changes are the result of path dependencies shaping policymaking (Chung & Thewissen, 2011;Kersbergen et al, 2014;Lallement 2011;Pontusson & Raess, 2012. Apart from the fact that large-scale organizations and redistributive institutional arrangements are difficult and costly to reform, there are also ideational components that create path dependent pressures.…”

“…Much scholarship about the retrenchment of the welfare state in Western Europe, and more specifically the analysis of reactions to the recent economic crisis, focuses on aggregate level economic trends, changed benefits and budget constraints (Armingeon 2012;Chung & Thewissen, 2011;Kersbergen et al, 2014;Pontusson & Raess, 2012;J́nsson & Stef́nsson 2013;Streeck & Schäfer 2013). Such a focus on measurable overall outcomes is important for better understanding political trends in times of crisis.…”

“…These countries have been the object of intensive scrutiny on a variety of topics (e.g. Béland et al 2014;Kammer 2012;Oesch 2006;Pontusson & Raess 2012;Thelen 2014) as they have often been taken to approximate the ideal typical welfare state regimes as defined by Esping-Andersen (1990; cf. Emmenegger et al 2015): conservative, social democratic and liberal, respectively.…”

Crisis and opportunity: Varieties of capitalism and varieties of crisis responses in Estonia and Slovenia

“…The corporatism-4 pluralism debate also highlighted that institutions shaped crisis responses during the 1970s in the aftermath of the oil shocks (Crouch, 1983;Lehmbruch and Schmitter, 1982;Molina and Rhodes, 2002 More generally, much of the political economy literature suggests that institutional differences can cause constrasting reactions to common shocks or common trends, such as the rise of the service economy (Iversen and Wren, 1998;Iversen and Soskice, 2015) or globalisation (Garrett 1998). On the other hand, while recent scholarship has shown that differences between liberal and coordinated market economies may have contributed to the build-up of global imbalances and the global economic crisis (Iversen and Soskice, 2012), there is no strong evidence to suggest that such differences have systematically shaped the variation in crisis responses across the OECD (Pontusson and Raess, 2012).…”