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This article comments on a special issue of Politics & Society that examines "quiet politics" and the power of business in an era of "noisy politics." The scholarship brought together in the issue shows that the world of business has indeed changed in the decade since Quiet Politics and Business Power was published, but also that quiet politics as a mode of low-salience interest advocacy seems alive and well. Building on this research, the article analyzes the different ways in which the rise of populist, noisy politics challenges business, how it challenges scholars studying business power, and how it challenges the functioning of the central feedback mechanism connecting political elites to mass publics in democracies—the media.

This essay highlights productive ways in which scholars have reanimated the concept of structural power to explain puzzles in international and comparative politics. Past comparative scholarship stressed the dependence of the state on holders of capital, but it struggled to reconcile this supposed dependence with the frequent losses of business in political battles. International relation (IR) scholars were attentive to the power of large states, but mainstream IR neglected the ways in which the structure of global capitalism makes large companies international political players in their own right. To promote a unified conversation between international and comparative political economy, structural power is best conceptualized as a set of mutual dependencies between business and the state. A new generation of structural power research is more attentive to how the structure of capitalism creates opportunities for some companies (but not others) vis-à-vis the state, and the ways in which that structure creates leverage for some states (but not others) to play off companies against each other. Future research is likely to put agents – both states and large firms – in the foreground as political actors, rather than showing how the structure of capitalism advantages all business actors in the same way against non-business actors.

Published Online: 22/08/2015 ; This essay highlights productive ways in which scholars have reanimated the concept of structural power to explain puzzles in international and comparative politics. Past comparative scholarship stressed the dependence of the state on holders of capital, but it struggled to reconcile this supposed dependence with the frequent losses of business in political battles. International relation (IR) scholars were attentive to the power of large states, but mainstream IR neglected the ways in which the structure of global capitalism makes large companies international political players in their own right. To promote a unified conversation between international and comparative political economy, structural power is best conceptualized as a set of mutual dependencies between business and the state. A new generation of structural power research is more attentive to how the structure of capitalism creates opportunities for some companies (but not others) vis-à-vis the state, and the ways in which that structure creates leverage for some states (but not others) to play off companies against each other. Future research is likely to put agents – both states and large firms – in the foreground as political actors, rather than showing how the structure of capitalism advantages all business actors in the same way against non-business actors.

Published online: 14 August 2014 ; This article explores the political economy of reform under the technocratic government of Mario Monti. Unlike the technocratic governments of the 1990s, the Monti interregnum was an experiment in unmediated democracy, in which a government is actively supported neither by political parties nor by encompassing social groups. Italian political leaders adopted unmediated democracy because of the underlying interest group conflicts in the Italian political economy. Unmediated democrats such as Monti can impose bitter medicine on a stalemated society when it is in a stage of acute crisis, but the passage of longer-term reforms requires a social coalition to support those reforms beyond the critical stage of crisis. Thus the government implemented budget cuts, but liberalisation and institutional reform stalled in the face of opposition. Italy is unlikely to be durably reformed by a government that is not anchored to society through political parties or interest groups.

Adapted from the source document.