Suchergebnisse

Why do actors that may be expected to contest finance-led capitalism in crisis periods rarely do so in effective and sustainable ways? This article contributes to the understanding of this question by explaining the sudden and puzzling silence of trade unions during the 1990-94 Swedish banking crisis. It underlines the importance of working within certain time-scales in prioritized policy areas for shaping strategic selectivity and precluding effective contest. The varied power of trade unions to perform effectively in different policy areas is important. However, cognitive-filters as stressed by constructivists are not. Findings point to a modified version of Korpi's power mobilization theory, where power resources are seen as refracted by the 'institutional materiality' of the corporatist state. Adapted from the source document.

Why do actors that may be expected to contest finance‐led capitalism in crisis periods rarely do so in effective and sustainable ways? This article contributes to the understanding of this question by explaining the sudden and puzzling silence of trade unions during the 1990–94 Swedish banking crisis. It underlines the importance of working within certain time‐scales in prioritized policy areas for shaping strategic selectivity and precluding effective contest. The varied power of trade unions to perform effectively in different policy areas is important. However, cognitive‐filters as stressed by constructivists are not. Findings point to a modified version of Korpi's power mobilization theory, where power resources are seen as refracted by the 'institutional materiality' of the corporatist state.

Although the financial/Eurozone crisis has profound effects on the EU, European integration scholarship failed to even recognise that there might be a problem. This article argues that this is due to the highly orthodox nature of European integration scholarship and the blind-spots that inhere in its instrumentalist basic code. It makes the case for a heterodox recasting of the production of knowledge about the EU, and argues that post-Keynesian, post-Marxist and neo-Weberian political economy can make significant contributions in that regard.

Why has the financial crisis not served as an occasion for social democratic revival? It is because, with the 'Third Way', European social democracy became imbricated with the financial system in crisis to such an extent that it is in no position to offer an alternative to it. The financial crisis is the crisis of the Third Way. Furthermore, the Third Way was based on the faulty premise that it was possible to replicate USA's apparent success in the 1990s, which, however, was based on very particular conditions. The argument is pursued with reference to inter alia Third Way ideology, transatlantic relations, the political economy of capitalist variety, and the political sociology of mass parties.

This article draws on the work of Poulantzas to argue that European social democracy is in crisis because European integration since the 1980s has been articulated within a relationship of structural subordination to US-led globalised financial capital, to which European capital has itself increasingly gravitated. This has also been the determining parameter of the state-as-social-relation, and contradicts the post-war welfare settlement. Against this backdrop, Europe has struggled to rearticulate a new social compromise and politics of social mediation. The attendant crisis of legitimisation has primarily benefited right-wing populism, which does not augur well for the health of Europe's synthesis of capitalism with democracy.