Suchergebnisse

Defence date: 15 December 1995 ; Examining board: Prof. Jean Blondel, EUI (supervisor) ; Prof. Jose Ramon Montero, Istituto Juan March (co-supervisor) ; Prof. Richard Gunther, Ohio State University ; Prof. Maurizio Cotta, Università degli Studi di Siena ; Prof. Paul Heywood, University of Nottingham ; First made available online: 23 August 2016

Are advanced democracies converging on a liberalized economic model, revolving around increasing penetration of markets and the decline of egalitarian institutions? The literature has tended to polarize between proponents of convergence and scholars who emphasize of the resilience of the distinct models of welfare capitalism. This article argues that although there is no strong evidence of convergence, the distribution of income in advanced democracies is becoming more unequal, suggesting significant change in a liberalizing direction. The article develops this argument by charting changes to the political economy of labour in two large European democracies: Italy and the United Kingdom. Despite belonging to entirely distinct 'families' of welfare capitalism, they have both undergone extensive changes to their political economy in the past three decades. We find that Italy and the UK were very different political economies in the 1970s, and remain very different today, but they have both undertaken reforms which have weakened egalitarian institutions and led to dramatic increases in poverty and inequality. This suggests that a focus on the diversity of institutional legacies and the distinct reform paths that we observe in advanced democracies should not distract from the conclusion that marketfocused economic reforms in very different institutional contexts can still lead to the same outcome: the privatization of economic risk and increased income inequality.

Existing studies of the political determinants of top incomes and inequality tend to focus on developments within individual countries, neglecting the role of interdependencies that transcend national borders. This article argues that the sharp rises in top incomes observed in recent years are in part a product of specific features originating in the US political economy, which were subsequently exported to other economies through the global expansion of US-based financial investors. To test the argument, we collect fine-grained micro-level data on executive pay and firm ownership structures for a comprehensive sample of publicly listed firms in the United Kingdom (UK). Our analyses uncover robust evidence that the Americanization of UK firm ownership leads to the financialization of remuneration practices and sizeable pay increases for high-level managers at those firms. Scrutinizing the causal mechanisms underlying this effect, we find them to be more consistent with changes in bargaining power inside firms rather than coercion from outside or exogenous shifts in labor markets for executives. The findings show the disruptive potential of Wall Street investments abroad to empower local managerial elites to capture greater rents and, more generally, demonstrate the need to take the transnational seriously in order to understand patterns of inequality in the global political economy.