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Abstract:
Contemporary approaches to varieties to capitalism are often criticized for
neglecting issues of institutional change. This paper develops an approach to
institutional change more extended than the one provided in Hall and Soskice
(in Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage,
Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001) but congruent with its varieties-ofcapitalism
perspective. It begins by outlining an approach to institutional stability,
which suggests that the persistence of institutions depends not only on their
aggregate welfare effects but also on the distributive benefits that they provide
to the underlying social or political coalitions; and not only on the Paretooptimal
quality of such equilibria but also on continuous processes of mobilization
through which the actors test the limits of the existing institutions. It then develops
an analysis of institutional change that emphasizes the ways in which defection,
reinterpretation and reform emerge out of such contestation and assesses
the accuracy of this account against recent developments in the political economies
of Europe. The paper concludes by outlining the implications of this perspective
for contemporary analyses of liberalization in the political economy.
