Same as it Never Was: Temporality and Typology in the Varieties of Capitalism
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Review
Same as it Never Was: Temporality and Typology in the Varieties of Capitalism Mark Blyth Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University, 338 Mergenthaler Hall, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
Comparative European Politics (2003) 1, 215–225. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cep.6110008
Perhaps it is simply a generational artifact, but every 10 years or so certain positions in the field of comparative political economy become canonical. I suspect that The Varieties of Capitalism (VOC) literature will do exactly this in the coming decade, framing more research projects than any other perspective, and shaping the way that an entire cohort of graduate students thinks about growth, employment and the critical issues of institutional convergence and divergence in a globalized economy. While the contributions to this literature are many, three works stand out: Kitschelt et al. (2000), Iversen et al. (2000), and Hall and Soskice (2001). The first iteration of this literature by Kitschelt et al., offered us a macrolevel model, where the proximate causes of domestic institutional transformation are exogenous changes in the global economy, and since such changes were seen to be mediated by institutions with increasing returns, divergence among national economic models remain (Kitschelt et al., 2000). In this first version of the Varieties literature, the action lay very much in the macro. Exogenous changes refracted through different sets of institutions to produce particular regime clusterings.1 The next iteration, Iversen et al. occupy a more meso level of analysis. For these authors, rather than simply intervening with external pressures in a passive way, certain meso-level variables, specifically; unions, employers and central banks, are seen as active agents that respond to external pressures. Thus, by focusing on the interaction of such agents, divergent national outcomes are explained. Yet, despite invoking different variables to those employed by Kitschelt et al. they come to the same conclusion — a ‘dual convergence’ thesis where Liberal Market Economies (LMEs) stand apart, and Coordinated Market Economies (CMEs), in general, converge on the German model (Iversen et al., 2000). Hall and Soskice, in turn, provide us with a micro-level analysis of the same phenomena, and in doing so they offer us, in many ways, the most theoretically
Mark Blyth Same as it Never Was: Temporality and Typology in the Varieties of Capitalism
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rich and complex version of the VOC literature. For Hall and Soskice, the locus of action and the mechanism through which outcomes are best explained are firms. VOC seeks to ‘bring firms back into the center of analysis’, by focusing on the strategic interaction of firms and other actors in game theoretic terms.2 Specifically, the responses of firms to five coordination problems determine a nation’s particular ‘variety of capitalism.’ These are: (i) how to coordinate bargaining with labor over wages and working conditions; (ii) how to secure suitable skills; (iii) how to respond to
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