The Shifting Relationship between Post-War Capitalism and Democracy (TheGovernment and Opposition/Leonard Schapiro Lecture, 2021)

Abstract

This article argues that the relationship between capitalism and democracy is not immutable but subject to changes over time best understood as movements across distinctive growth and representation regimes. Growth regimes are the institutionalized practices central to how a country secures economic prosperity based on complementary sets of firm strategies and government policies. Representation regimes reflect conditions in the arenas of electoral and producer group politics that confer influence on specific segments of the population. The emphasis is on how economic experiences and changes in the structure of electoral cleavages alter the terms of political contestation, thereby giving voice to specific sets of interests and altering the balance of influence between capitalism and democracy. The analysis examines how the growth and representation regimes of the developed democracies have changed through three post-war eras to yield distinctive distributive outcomes in each era.

Conflict or cooperation? Exploring the relationship between cooperative institutions and robotisation

“…As Frey (2019) points out, this tendency to create ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ requires careful management and negotiation, at all levels of the political economy if automation is to be politically acceptable in the long run. We know from extensive literature in comparative political economy that this type of game between workers and employers takes different institutional forms across rich democracies (Hall & Soskice, 2001; Iversen and Soskice, 2019; Hall, 2021) with some economies heavily reliant on markets to allocate resources, some choosing to focus on dense networks of institutions to secure non‐market coordination, and other, still, focusing their efforts on post‐hoc redistribution through extensive welfare provisions. What remains unclear is that how these important institutional differences, and the relative allocation of power‐resources between capital and labour they engender, influences automation itself.…”

Liberal Democracy on the Edge? Anxieties in a Shifting Global (dis)order

“…5Historically, the relationship between capitalism and democracy has been an uneasy one. For a recent discussion, see Hall (2022).…”

Banking Nationalism and Resolution in Italy and Spain

“…Alternative banks are the most financially fragile in Spain and Italy, compared to their larger, more commercial, internationalized and diversified counterparts. Their closure or restructuring creates local political pressure that national governments either seek to overcome or support through resisting technocratic rule application (Hall 2022). Has the SRM helped these two countries solve their problems, or do other factors weigh more heavily?…”

“…Second, this article adds to the small but growing literature on the implementation of eurozone rules, institutions and policies surrounding bank resolution (Donnelly 2018; Donnelly and Asimakopoulos 2020; Finke 2020; Woll 2014) that inform open questions about the strengths and weaknesses of the Banking Union's construction. In this piece, we additionally underline the political agency of European, national and local governments in determining the course of the supervision and resolution process and the overall effectiveness and national acceptance of European economic governance (Hall 2022; Merler 2021) that fit the interests of this journal.…”