Varieties of Capitalism and ‘the Great Moderation’

Abstract

When Peter Hall and David Soskice wrote their introduction to the now widely cited collection of essays they published in 2001 under the title Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundation of Comparative Advantage, they could hardly have known how important in the history of comparative political economy that introduction was going to be. True, they saw their own work as an important attempt to shift the goal posts — as ‘a new approach to the comparison of national economies’ — one that was capable in their mind of going beyond the ‘three perspectives on institutional variation that [had] dominated the study of comparative capitalisms [CC] in the preceding thirty years’ (Hall and Soskice, 2001, pp. v, 2). They saw themselves, that is, as challengers to the dominant approaches of the day in comparative political economy — challengers to the modernization paradigm, the neo-corporatism framework and the social systems of production approach. What they presumably did not see, as they drafted that introductory chapter, was the speed with which their approach would replace those three in dominance. This chapter, which draws heavily on correspondence with many of the key players involved, has been written to explain this unexpected rise to dominance and to evaluate the significance of its subsequent erosion (see also Bruff et al., in this volume).