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The expanding literature on growth regimes has recently been applied to explain the growth of populist movements across the OECD. Such applications posit a stand-off between debtors and creditors as the core conflict that generates populism. While insightful, the theory has problems explaining why, in some European countries, such movements pre-date both the global financial crisis and the austerity measures that followed, factors that are commonly seen as causing the rise of populism. This article takes a different tack. It derives shifts in both political parties and party systems from the growth regime framework. In doing so it seeks to explain the evolution of the cartel form of party that dominated the political systems of Europe from the late 1990s through to the current period and why that form proved unable to respond meaningfully to both the financial crisis and the political crisis that followed it.

[T]he financial crisis can be best understood as the final catastrophic stage of a process of dismantling the protective institutions that made Western European capitalism politically sustainable …

The recent rise of populism is a culmination of long-term trends. As the established parties converged on economic orthodoxies, they lost their hold on changing electorate.

In this introduction to the special issue "The New Politics of Inequality in Europe," recent literature on income inequality in the advanced democracies is summarized. It is argued that dominant accounts are too heavily focused on the United States, whereas the experience of Western European countries has been neglected. Although income inequality has risen nearly everywhere in the rich industrial democracies since the end of the 1970s, it has done so from different starting points, at different rates, and for reasons connected to different mechanisms and different parts of the distribution. Extending the analysis to Western Europe enables us to understand these variations more fully.

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.

This article examines the conditions under which the United States foreign military bases become a contentious political issue in democratic base-hosting countries. Democratic consolidation, and in particular the institutionalization of the party system, reduces the incentives for political elites to mobilize domestic political support in opposition to foreign military presence. In the Spanish case, changes in the pattern of party competition explain why the basing issue was particularly contentious in domestic politics from 1981 to 1988, despite long-standing and profound public opposition to the use of the bases by the United States, and most recently in the 2003 Iraq campaign. Neither a public opinion explanation, focusing on anti-Americanism, nor a security-based explanation, focusing on the nature of bilateral security relations, can explain these same trends. The argument illuminates long-neglected important interactions in emerging democracies between party system dynamics and foreign policy positions and has important implications for determining the domestic political conditions under which overseas democratic countries will contest United States security hegemony.