Contemporary challenges to the German vocational training system

The German vocational training system has played a central role in sustaining the competitive strength of German manufacturing. This article provides an analysis of contemporary developments in this system to assess its likely future trajectory. I begin by underscoring the differences and similarities of the German system to alternative arrangements that have emerged in other countries. I then turn to recent trends in Germany that have caused concern among policy‐makers about the continued strength and viability of the vocational training system. I discuss reforms undertaken in the past few years that point to incremental, though possibly transformative, changes in the system designed to reduce costs and increase flexibility through renegotiations on two fronts: between general training standards and firm needs and training practices, and between the in‐plant and school‐based components of training.     

Institutional competitiveness,social investment,and welfare regimes

Are the rather generous welfare regimes found in most European countries sustainable; that is, are they competitive in a globalizing economy? Or will they, on the contrary, be crowded out by the more austere and less expensive regimes generally found in liberal Anglo‐Saxon countries? We first discuss this issue conceptually, focusing on the notions of institutional competitiveness, social investment, and short‐term and long‐term productivity. We then briefly present the results of an empirical study of 50 social indicators of policies and outcomes in 20 Organization for Economic Co‐operation and Development (OECD) countries during the early 2000s. We conclude that welfare regimes have not been forced to converge through a “race to the bottom.” There remain three distinct ways to face the “trilemma” of job growth, income inequality, and fiscal restraint: Nordic countries achieve high labor market participation through high social investment; Anglo‐Saxon countries attain the same objective through minimal public intervention; while Continental European countries experience fiscal pressures because their social protection schemes are not promoting participation to the same extent.     

The new Korean political economy: beyond the models of capitalism debate

Abstract

A key theme within the literature on the evolution of the Korean political economy since the 1997/8 crisis has been the extent to which Korea remains a ‘developmental state’ or has pursued radical neoliberal reform. These debates have not only reflected a concern with understanding the Korean economy but with a wider set of questions relating to the future of capitalist diversity within a globalized economy. By the late 1980s Korea had come to be regarded as a model of successful state-led late capitalist development. Korean modern economic history has insured that questions relating to the extent that it has pursued neoliberal reform have been of keen interest to students of political economy globally. This paper argues that substantive neoliberal reform has taken place in Korea since 1997. The thesis that a new ‘developmental state’ is in process of consolidating itself is simply wrong. However, the state's reform program interacted with material conditions and political coalitions at the meso level in a complex and uneven manner. In certain critical sectors, such as finance, a neoliberal regulatory regime has been consolidated. In others, such as telecommunications, developmentalist regulatory structures have proven to be highly resilient. In order to fully understand the complexity of the contemporary Korean political economy it is necessary, therefore, to prioritize the importance of meso-level analysis.     

Varieties of hierarchical capitalism: family and state market economies in East Asia

Through an examination of East Asian economies, this paper proposes two new capitalist ideal types: family market economies and state market economies. In contrast to coordinated and liberal market economy types, the new capitalist ideal types proposed here display alternative forms of hierarchical coordination. These ideal types are also genuinely novel models of capitalism because they exhibit distinct and stable institutional structures and comparative advantages.     

Crisis management and the diversity of capitalism: fiscal stimulus packages and the East Asian (neo-)developmental state

Abstract

This paper contributes to the understanding of East Asian capitalism by investigating the political economy of crisis management in Japan, Korea and China during the global economic crisis. Reacting to the global shock of the economic crisis that began in 2008, East Asian capitalism has remained a distinct state-led model that differs substantially from the liberal, neo-corporatist or welfare state varieties of capitalism in the West. More specifically, this paper studies the fiscal stimulus packages implemented by East Asian countries to address the global financial crisis from 2008 to 2010. We find that East Asian fiscal stimulus packages were comparatively large and supply-side-oriented. Unlike in the West, where a (short-lived) revival of demand-side-oriented Keynesian strategies stimulating consumption could be observed, East Asian countries reinforced industrial policies and supported investment and international competitiveness. We argue that the East Asian variety of crisis management can largely be explained by a path-dependent transformation of the East Asian developmental state into a neo-developmental competition state.     

The prospects of egalitarian capitalism in the global South: Turkish social neoliberalism in comparative perspective

Abstract

This paper studies the transformation of economic and social policy in Turkey during the 2000s. The policy mix that has emerged can be usefully conceptualized as social neoliberalism, combining relatively orthodox neoliberal economic policies and retrenchment of the protective welfare state (e.g. labour market institutions) with a significant expansion, both in terms of public spending and population coverage, of the productive welfare state (e.g. public health care). Therefore, social neoliberalism as a development model is distinct both from social democracy and orthodox neoliberalism. Its rise in Turkey during the 2000s is arguably best understood with reference to the interests of the AKP's support coalition, the salience of inequalities in access to public services, and the disconnect of social policy-making from civil society mobilization. Turkey's experience with social neoliberalism provides an important reference point for theorizing the ‘social turn’ that since the 2000s has occurred in many late-developing countries with now maturing welfare states, including Brazil, South Africa, Mexico and Chile.     

Restraining Gulliver: Institutional reform and the strengthening of state capacity and compliance

Governance in the developing world is fraught with problems of corruption, weak institutions, and inadequate expertise among bureaucrats. Failing to enforce laws and regulations is one way in which these problems manifest themselves. In this paper, we evaluate changes across three institutions charged with oversight or administration of labor justice in Mexico. We find that both autonomy from the executive and professionalization are necessary to improve compliance with labor law over time. Our study shows that professionalization can occur in several ways, including through training, merit hiring, and introducing experienced external administrators. The implications of the study are that reforms that increase the independence and legal authority of oversight institutions should be complemented by efforts to strengthen the professionalism of bureaucrats.     

Deliberative Innovation to Different Effect: Consensus Conferences in Denmark, France, and the United States

Democratic reformers are attracted by the role that advisory forums composed of lay citizens can play in public consultation on complex policy issues (such as participatory technology assessment). Using a comparative study of consensus conferences on the issue of genetically modified food in Denmark, France, and the United States, the authors show that the potential of such deliberative "mini-publics" is quite different in different sorts of political system. They attend to the mode of establishment, perceived legitimacy, policy impact, and influence on public debate of the forum in each case. In actively inclusive Denmark,mini-publics are deployed in integrative fashion; in exclusive France, in managerial fashion; and in the passively inclusive United States, in advocacy fashion. Proponents and practitioners of deliberative participatory reforms should take into account the constraints and opportunities revealed by this analysis and attend to the different roles that mini-publics might play in different political systems.     

How to change other people's institutions: discursive entrepreneurship and the boundary object of competition/competitiveness in the German banking sector

Abstract

The paper explores recent public debates about the structure of the financial system in Germany. It pays particular attention to their symbolic-strategic dimension, that is, to attempts by several institutional entrepreneurs to reformulate the criteria of organizational legitimacy, concentrating on the sense-making and legitimization processes involved in institutional persistence or change. The paper discourse-analyses a campaign by institutional entrepreneurs – mainly representatives of commercial banks – who attempted to homogenize the criteria of organizational legitimacy in the German banking sector by questioning the fundamentals of the three-pillar system and the non-commercial banks. Institutional entrepreneurs are understood as discursive entrepreneurs whose actions refer to institutionalized generalizations of value. In the case of the financial sector in Germany, it was the generalized value of competition/competitiveness that served as a discursive device to legitimize the attempts of commercial banks to alter the institutional structure.     

Institutional Congruence, Ideas, and Anticorruption Policy: The Case of China and the United States

While international comparisons of anticorruption policies abound, whether these policies are transferable and how they change inside national boundaries remain debatable. Kaifeng Yang of Florida State University proposes an institutional framework that emphasizes the role of congruence and ideas in institutional change. In comparing China to the United States, the author concludes that anticorruption institutional change is path dependent, as it is nested in fundamental political structures and meta-narratives. Professor Yang proposes the possibility that new ideas may cause gradual changes with radical results.     

Assessing Policy Design and Interpretation: An Institutions‐Based Analysis in the Context of Aquaculture in Florida and Virginia,United States

Recently in the field of policy studies, there has been a renewed interest in research that connects policy design with broader governance outcomes. As opposed to past studies of policy design that have characterized policies along broad categories of variables, however, recent studies have sought to systematically assess the language of public policies and resultant outcomes. This paper contributes to the existing and emerging literature on policy design by coupling a content analysis of polices governing the aquaculture industry in two U.S. states and interviews with aquaculture community members to understand policy design and perceptions of policy legitimacy, coerciveness, and enforcement.     

The Institutional Basis of Secessionist Politics: Federalism and Secession in the United States

According to the literature on secession, the most importantdeterminant of secessionist sentiment is a high level of grievanceexperienced by the would-be secessionist group. However, therationale behind using secession (as opposed to another strategy)as a grievance-amelioration strategy remains almost completelyunexplained. This article contends that the institutional settingin which political conflict and grievance are experienced playsa crucial role in whether secession is conceived of as a viableoption. This contention is tested by examining the institutionalenvironment of federalism and the role it played in secessionin the United States in 1860 and 1861. The United States wasuniquely vulnerable to secessionist pressures—as are allfederal states, potentially—because of institutional structuresthat gave constituent states a high level of institutional authorityand capacity; this, in turn, contributed to a discourse of states'rights that included the contested right to secede.     

Selling the self: career portfolios and the new common-sense of immaterial capitalism

This article presents a discourse analysis of a popular guide to composing career portfolios. Comprised of documents from work, school, and personal life, career portfolios chart workers’ personal trajectories from past to present to future. Job applicants use these texts to sell themselves to potential employers. In explaining how to compose portfolios, it is argued, the guide examined in this article (re)produces and circulates common-sense ideas about work in our current era. Central to these common-sense notions are: personal investment in work; deterritorialization of socio-cultural resources (e.g. ways of thinking, speaking, and interacting developed in non-work domains); and reterritorialization of these same resources in the domain of work. To explore these common-sense ideas, I engage Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's arguments about immaterial capitalism and the deterritorialization and reterritorialization of labor.     

The United States,Japan, and the European Union: comparing political economy approaches to China

Abstract

This paper examines US, Japanese, and European political economy approaches to China, and their effect on US–Japan and US–EU relationships. Great powers with a greater security concern in dealing with another major country care more about power while those with less of a concern are preoccupied with calculations for wealth. China's rise and its actions have posed a far greater security challenge to the United States and Japan and are driving the two countries closer together. The political economy game involving China reveals a dominant welfare motive among the advanced market economies. The ambition to transform China politically has diminished. China's integration into the global market makes a relative gains approach difficult to implement. Globalization simply limits the ability of a state to follow a politics-in-command approach in the absence of actual military conflict, which explains why the political economy approaches of the United States, Europe, and Japan are not that different in the scheme of things. China's own grand strategy to reach out to the world to outflank the US–Japan alliance has also contributed to a divergent European policy toward China although there are severe limitations to Beijing's ability to drive a wedge between the United States and Europe.     

The Institutionalization of Environmental Attention in the United States and Denmark: Multiple- versus Single-Venue Systems

The European countries have surpassed the United States with regard to comprehensive and stringent environmental regulation. This policy pattern has become very visible in the international debate about reduction of CO₂ emissions. From a comparative public policy perspective, the recent difference is interesting because it restates the question about policy consequences of political institutions. This article addresses this theoretical question from the perspective of policy agenda-setting theory. We present the argument that while the U.S. political system, with its many "venues" that are relatively open to internal and external competing forces, might be quicker in generating attention to new issues like the environment, the institutionalization of attention is also less strong than in a European parliamentary system. The article substantiates this argument with empirics by comparing attention to and policymaking for environmental issues in the United States to Denmark.     

Regulatory capitalism and its discontents: Bilateral interdependence and the adaptability of regulatory styles

The expansion of global trade has produced new challenges for the effective governance of product safety. We argue that many of these challenges arise at the bilateral level from the interaction of more or less adaptable national regulatory styles. When regulatory styles are unadaptable they produce gaps in risk management, slow and contested resolutions to crises, and limited regulatory cooperation. To examine these claims empirically, we study bilateral food safety regulation in four major exporter–importer dyads: China–Japan; Canada–United States (US), China–European Union (EU), and the US–Japan. The China–Japan dyad is the most adaptable, combining China's “export segmentation” regulatory style with Japan's strongly “risk‐averse, interventionist” style. The Canada–US dyad operates effectively, bringing together Canada's “global market–conforming” regulatory style with the US strategy of “sovereign regulator.” The China–EU dyad is less adaptable because the EU's “harmonization” regulatory style makes it difficult for the EU to adapt to the weaknesses of the Chinese food safety system. Finally, the US's sovereign regulator style clashes with Japan's interventionist style, making them the least adaptable of the four dyads. The paper concludes with a discussion of the broader relevance of our findings for the development of regulatory capitalism.     

Business conflict and international law: The political economy of copyright in the United States

The internet industry has emerged as an important economic and political actor, both within the United States and internationally. Internet companies depend on exceptions from copyright law in order to operate. As a result, internet companies have considerable incentive to try and influence international copyright law. However, the current literature has neglected the role of the internet industry, instead focusing on the influence of copyright owning media companies. This has largely homogenized the concerns of business interests, neglecting the interests of business actors which do not favor stricter copyright protection. By examining business conflict over recent copyright initiatives by the United States, this article criticizes the literature. It illustrates that the internet industry has been able to alter the negotiating preferences of the United States against the wishes of copyright owners. This argues against the homogenization of business interests regarding copyright while illustrating the importance of material over discursive factors in determining political outcomes.     

Estimating the Impact of Education on Political Participation: Evidence from Monozygotic Twins in the United States,Denmark and Sweden

In this study we provide new evidence on the much-discussed effect of education on political participation by utilizing the quasi-experiment of twinning. By looking at the relationship between education and participation within monozygotic (MZ) twin pairs we are able to circumvent traditional sources of confounding of the relationship rooted in genes and early life family environment because MZ twins share both. The results of within-twin pair analyses based on surveys from the United States, Denmark and Sweden show that while the relationship between education and political participation is highly confounded by genes and/or familial environment in all three countries, a positive impact remains of years of education in the US and of high school completion in Denmark. No effect is found in Sweden. Robustness checks suggest that the observed effect is not confounded by within-twin pair differences in prenatal environment nor differential treatment during childhood, and, if anything, that it most likely constitutes a lower bound estimate.     

The relationship between political attitudes and political participation: Evidence from monozygotic twins in the United States,Sweden, Germany,and Denmark

Many studies have shown that political efficacy, interest in politics, and political knowledge are strongly related to political participation. In most analyses, these variables are described as having a causal effect on participation. In this paper, we examine the extent to which the relationship between political attitudes and participation is confounded by familial factors. By using the discordant twin design, which relates within-pair differences in political attitudes to within-pair differences in political participation, we are able to examine the relationship net of confounding factors rooted in genes and the early rearing environment. Using four samples of monozygotic twins from the United States, Sweden, Germany, and Denmark, we find that the relationship between political attitudes and political participation is confounded to a large extent. This study makes an important contribution to the literature on political attitudes and political participation given the longstanding idea that attitudes cause political participation. Our findings also have practical implications for those interested in elevating levels of political participation. In addition, they have important implications for how scholars theorize about, model, and examine political participation in the future.     

Rent seeking for madness: the political economy of mental asylums in the United States, 1870 to 1910

Public Choice - Recent studies indicate that the ideological stances of government parties no are longer associated with differences in total government spending. At the same time, we observe that...