SASE Annual Meeting 2009, Paris, France: Economic regulation and social solidarity: conceptual and analytic innovations in the study of advanced capitalism

Abstract

The title for this year’s SASE conference, ‘Capitalism in Crisis: Economic Regulation and Social Solidarity after the Fall of Finance Capitalism’, reflects the turbulent times in which we find ourselves. Policymakers struggle to respond to rapidly unfolding developments, while academics assess how well their theories capture those features of the contemporary situation that best reflect the choices these actors confront. Contemporary developments pose a special challenge for institutionalist theories of political economy since many of the institutional arrangements on which our explanations of cross-national policy differences are based are themselves in flux. The most widely used framework in the literature is that proposed by Peter A. Hall and David Soskice in their influential volume Varieties of Capitalism (2001). The framework they lay out is based on national models defined by