Description: This book serves as a sequel to two distinguished volumes on capitalism: Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism (Cambridge, 1999) and Order and Conflict in Contemporary Capitalism (1985). Both volumes took stock of major economic challenges advanced industrial democracies faced, as well as the ways political and economic elites dealt with them. However, during the last decades, the structural environment of advanced capitalist democracies has undergone profound changes: sweeping deindustrialization, tertiarization of the employment structure, and demographic developments. This book provides a synthetic view allowing the reader to grasp the nature of these structural transformations and their consequences in terms of the politics of change, policy outputs, and outcomes. In contrast to functionalist and structuralist approaches, the book advocates and contributes to a "return of electoral and coalitional politics" to political economy research.
Brief description: Pablo Beramendi is Associate Professor of Political Science at Duke University, North Carolina. He is the author of The Political Geography of Inequality (Cambridge, 2013), winner of the 2013 APSA Best Book Award from the European Politics and Society section and 2014 Honorable Mention recipient of the APSA Luebbert Best Book Award.
Review Quotes: "This book offers the most compelling single-volume treatment to date of the evolution of advanced democratic capitalism and its subtypes. It provides state-of-the-art analysis of the character of postindustrial changes, their impact on cleavages and citizen preferences, and how parties fashion winning postindustrial political coalitions behind particular paths of adjustment. In doing so, Beramendi and colleagues reject functionalist and structuralist explanations of contemporary change and highlight the centrality of coalition building, partisan competition, and electoral politics for understanding the trajectories of advanced nations. The book concludes with an insightful examination of the consequences of particular paths of postindustrial policy adaption for economic outcomes, equality, and life satisfaction as well as the impact of recent economic crises on advanced capitalism. It is a superb contribution."
Duane Swank, President of the APSA Organized Section on Comparative Politics, Marquette University, Wisconsin