This essay reviews the development of approaches within the comparative capitalisms (CC) literature and points to three theoretical innovations which, taken together, define and distinguish these approaches as a group. First, national economies are characterized by distinct institutional...

I argue that in its adaptation from Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation, the concept of embeddedness has itself undergone a great transformation. In the process, significant meanings of the concept have vanished, while others have been added. First I explore the different meanings the...

The performance of the Danish economy in the 1990s has been successful to the extent that scholars are talking about a Danish miracle. The importance of government policies to Denmark's economic success is taken as a point of departure in investigating why Danish governments have been able to...

Corporatism has been one of the most heavily studied concepts in comparative political economy over the past two decades, and quantitative indicators of corporatism have played a central role in the corporatist literature. This paper offers a survey and assessment of 42 such indicators. The...

This paper builds on the idea that trust is a matter of embedded agency where trustors and trustees, as actors, interpret the social context in which they are embedded. Insofar as this context is institutionalized, trust may be quite 'normal' and achieved fairly easily by reference to...

This paper examines the relationship among economic context, political institutions, and the political dynamics of adjustment within national models of capitalism through an analysis of recent labor-market reform in France and Germany. It argues that a climate of economic austerity since the...

Voters who participate in elections to the European Parliament tend to use these elections to punish their domestic governing parties. Many students of the EU therefore claim that the party-political composition of the Parliament should systematically differ from that of the Council. This study,...

Corporate governance in Germany is often described as a bank-oriented, block-holder or stakeholder model where markets for corporate control have not played a significant role. This case study of the hostile takeover of Mannesmann AG by Vodafone in 2000 demonstrates how systemic changes during...

Lobbying by economic actors constitutes a central element of a large part of the literature on trade policy-making. However, it is mainly considered as 'input' into the political system, which then aggregates the demand of different societal interests. As such inputs, the preferences of economic...

Panel data analysis has become very popular in comparative political economy. However, in order to draw meaningful inferences from such data, one has to address specification and estimation issues carefully. This paper aims to demonstrate various pitfalls that typically occur in applied...