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AbstractInvestments in education and retraining, or research and development have become essential in today's knowledge‐intensive economies. While private actors often underprovided such knowledge‐based capital due to various market failures, there is also considerable variation in the extent to which governments invest in knowledge‐based capital due to cross‐sectional and intertemporal trade‐offs. I argue that in trying to account for this variation, corporatist institutions are a neglected but crucial factor. By necessitating and facilitating cooperation and compensation, corporatism creates a more collaborative style of policy making and a sense of common ownership of policy problems that helps overcome the trade‐offs associated with investments in knowledge‐based capital. Using within‐between mixed‐effects models on a novel time‐series‐cross‐sectional dataset, I find strong support for this argument. Corporatist countries invest a lot more in knowledge‐based capital, and corporatism also affects how countries react to deindustrialization. This is an important finding given the key role of long‐term policy making in areas like climate change politics, pandemic preparedness or responding to the digital transformation.

AbstractPlatform companies like Uber not only disrupt existing markets but also contest existing regulatory regimes. This raises the question of how, when, and why such companies are regulated. This article develops, tests, and defends a theoretical framework that explains the politics of regulatory response to the rise of platform capitalism. Using discourse network analysis and a case study on the regulation of Uber in New York, it shows that the success or failure of regulations depends on the ability of actors to mobilize broad coalition; that narratives affect the composition of these coalitions; and that platform companies have both unique political strengths and vulnerabilities. This article makes substantive contributions to our understanding of the politics of platform capitalism, and it makes theoretical contributions to the literature studies on coalitional politics, ideational institutionalism, and business power.

AbstractFor decades, the EU's trade policy has been centred around open(ing) markets. Why, then, has the EU recently embraced open strategic autonomy as the conceptual cornerstone of its renewed trade policy? In this article, we argue that this move away from neoliberalism has to be understood against the background of a changing global environment. The geopoliticization of trade in particular has changed the Commission's view about how to best serve European interests (and values) but also provided an opening for neo‐mercantilist and socially oriented actors to challenge Europe's embedded neoliberal compromise. Using document analysis, interviews and discourse network analysis, we show how the Commission used open strategic autonomy as a coalition magnet to mobilize support for its new doctrine of qualified openness. Our paper contributes to understanding the ideational and coalitional politics behind the recent evolution of EU trade policy as well as broader debates around European autonomy and sovereignty.

AbstractNew forms of work intermediation – the gig economy – and the growing use of advanced digital technologies – the new knowledge economy – are changing the nature of work. The digitalization of work, however, is shaped by how countries respond to it. But how countries respond to digitalization, we argue, depends on how digitalization is perceived in the first place. Using text-as-data methods on a novel corpus of translated newspaper and policy documents from eight European countries as well as qualitative evidence from interviews and secondary sources, we show that there are clear country effects in how digitalization is framed and fought over. Drawing on discursive–institutionalist and coalitional approaches, we argue that institutional differences explain these discursive differences by structuring interpretative struggles in favor of the social coalitions that support them. Actors, however, can also challenge these institutions by using the discursive agency to change these underlying support coalitions.

In recent years, data have become part and parcel of contemporary capitalism. This has created tensions between the growing demand for personal data and the fundamental right to data protection. Against this background, the EU's adoption of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2016 is puzzling. Why did the EU adopt a regulation that strengthens data protection despite intensive lobbying by powerful business groups and the EU's supposed neoliberal bias? We make two arguments to explain this outcome. First, we use process tracing to show how issue‐specific institutions played a crucial role during the agenda‐setting stage (1990s–2009) and policy formulation stage (2009–2012). They triggered and structured the drafting process by strengthening the position of data protection advocates within the European Commission. Second, we use discourse network analysis to show that the Snowden revelations of 2013 fundamentally changed the discursive and coalitional dynamics during the decision‐making stage (2012–2016). The salience shock it produced "saved" the GDPR from being watered down, by incentivizing policymakers to distance themselves from business interests and by exposing the geo‐economic dimension of data protection. This article thus offers a comprehensive explanation of the GDPR, while contributing to the literature on the political economy of data protection.

When it comes to the German chancellor, then the current crisis the European Monetary Union, Europe has also led to a 'crossroads'. In the eyes of the federal government future weal and woe of the European nations depend critically on whether they decide in the face of the crisis on the path of political and economic convenience or for the virtue path an equally ambitious as specific reform policies. In this reading, the crisis is not only a threat to the European achievements of the past, but even more so a prospective event at which the foundations for Europe's future in a globalized and increasingly multipolar world order structured are placed in the long run. Not the Euro crisis itself, it seems, is the real problem, but the meaning and relative welfare loss of European nations whose symptom and it is a beacon. Adapted from the source document.