Suchergebnisse

AbstractThis article argues that the relationship between capitalism and democracy is not immutable but subject to changes over time best understood as movements across distinctive growth and representation regimes. Growth regimes are the institutionalized practices central to how a country secures economic prosperity based on complementary sets of firm strategies and government policies. Representation regimes reflect conditions in the arenas of electoral and producer group politics that confer influence on specific segments of the population. The emphasis is on how economic experiences and changes in the structure of electoral cleavages alter the terms of political contestation, thereby giving voice to specific sets of interests and altering the balance of influence between capitalism and democracy. The analysis examines how the growth and representation regimes of the developed democracies have changed through three post-war eras to yield distinctive distributive outcomes in each era.

This article explores the role played by electoral politics in the evolution of postwar growth regimes, understood as the economic and social policies used by governments of the developed democracies to pursue economic growth. It charts changes in growth regimes beginning with an era of modernization stretching from 1950 to 1975, through an era of liberalization running from 1980 to 2000, to a subsequent era of knowledge-based growth. Its overarching claim is that the inclination and capacities of democratic governments to pursue specific growth regimes depend not only on economic circumstances but also on evolving electoral conditions, marked especially by changes in the cleavages that condition partisan electoral strategies. This electoral dynamic affects the balance of influence over policy between actors in the electoral and producer-group arenas and carries implications for the social compromises that democracies can construct. The article concludes by exploring the implications of contemporary electoral politics for the development of growth regimes appropriate to a knowledge economy.