Suchergebnisse

The varieties of capitalism literature has put skill systems at the center of comparative politics. Yet its claims about skill specificity are driven by two large coordinated economies, Germany and Japan. This article examines political change of skills in two small coordinated economies. Switzerland has expanded its general skills orientation, whereas Austria retains a highly specific skills system. The cause of this divergence is the different interests of small and large employers: Small employers are more cost sensitive than are large employers, which leads them to oppose the introduction of more general education. The study also shows that the primary measure of skill specificity used in quantitative work—vocational training share—is unreliable. It fails to distinguish between secondary and tertiary vocational training, which have opposite effects on skill specificity. The article develops and justifies an alternative measure—tertiary vocational training—that better predicts the skills clusters observed in advanced capitalism.

What happens when the unstoppable force of liberalization collides with the immovable object of national financial institutions in the advanced industrial democracies? To answer this question and evaluate alternative mechanisms to explain institutional change, this article examines the cases of the three large European economies with concentrated share ownership—France, Germany, and Italy. In the formal legal mechanism, interest coalitions adopt new laws, leading actors to deviate from formerly stable patterns of behavior in shareholding. In the joint belief shift mechanism, collective actors use a triggering event to jointly reevaluate their views of how the world works and thus how their interests can best be pursued. Using the metric of patient capital, this article shows that institutional change took place in France but not in Germany or Italy, despite the fact that Germany and Italy experienced significant regulatory change in the area of corporate governance while France did not. This evidence fits joint belief shift and is inconsistent with the formal legal mechanism. It is likely that the importance of the two mechanisms of institutional change depends on the degree of strategic interdependence among institutional actors: where it is high, the joint belief shift mechanism is likely to precipitate change; and where it is low, the formal legal mechanism is likely to precipitate change.