The “financial crisis” and its sequel, the current sovereign debt crisis, appear to be the latest permutations of an old conflict between capitalism and democracy that forcefully reasserted itself after the end of the postwar growth period. Today’s calamities were preceded by high...

Rising public debt has been widespread in democratic-capitalist political economies since the 1970s, generally accompanied among other things by weak economic growth, rising unemployment, increasing inequality, growing tax resistance, and declining political participation. Following an initial...

The rise of the consolidation state follows the displacement of the classical tax state, or Steuerstaat, by what I have called the debt state, a process that began in the 1980s in all rich capitalist democracies. Consolidation is the contemporary response to the "fiscal crisis of the state"...

Five sectors -- Industry-wide collective bargaining : shrinking core, expanding fringes -- Intermediary organization : declining membership, rising tensions -- Social policy : the rise and fall of welfare corporatism -- Public finance : the fiscal crisis of the postwar state -- Corporate...