Economic Political Institutions Research Articles

Realistic Idealism and The Project of Political Economy

AbstractThis paper explores the constraints that should inform understandings of which political economic institutions are both economically and political feasible and ethically attractive. Focusing on cognitive constraints and motivational constraints, it suggests that the classical liberal ideal of a society based largely on voluntary exchanges within a minimalist conception of justice comes closest to matching the terms of a ‘realistic idealism’.

La estructuración axiológica del orden económico en defensa de la propiedad y la libre iniciativa. El justo equilibrio hacia el desarrollo

Economic Law has an extremely important role in society. It structures the Economic Order responsible for the rules for the production of wealth and its respective distribution, so it must have strong institutions to ensure a greater participation of citizens in growth –thus heading towards development– or centralise the power of such political-economic institutions to minimise the distribution and access to property to a minority, thus heading towards stagnation. Property as a juridical institution and free initiative as its exploring activity have a special meaning in this axiological structure and its strengthening towards development, which we outline in this paper.

Why governments intervene: Exploring mixed motives for public policies on corporate social responsibility

Why are national governments increasingly adopting policies on corporate social responsibility (CSR)? Government CSR policies have been explained either as a means of substituting or supporting (mirroring) domestic political-economic institutions and policies, or as a means for government to promote international competitiveness of domestic businesses. Both sets of explanations see governments as driving CSR policies to meet particular national government goals. Support is found for the thesis that CSR policies are often related to international competitiveness, yet our findings suggest that government goals in this regard are not necessarily pre-defined.

Why Governments Intervene: Exploring Mixed Motives for Public Policies on CSR

Why are national governments increasingly adopting policies on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)? Government CSR policies have been explained either as a means of substituting or supporting (mirroring) domestic political-economic institutions and policies, or as a means for government to promote international competitiveness of domestic businesses. Both sets of explanations see governments as driving CSR policies to meet particular national government goals. Support is found for the thesis that CSR policies are often related to international competitiveness, yet our findings suggest that government goals in this regard are not necessarily pre-defined.

Varieties of Capitalism: Trajectories of Liberalization and the New Politics of Social Solidarity

This essay reviews recent literature on varieties of capitalism, drawing on insights from existing studies to propose a new, more differentiated way of thinking about contemporary changes in the political economies of the rich democracies. The framework offered here breaks with the “continuum models” on which much of the traditional literature has been based, in which countries are arrayed along a single dimension according to their degree of “corporatism” or, more recently, of “coordination.” In so doing, it reveals combinations—continued high levels of equality with significant liberalization, and declining solidarity in the context of continued significant coordination—that existing theories rule out by definition. I argue that these puzzling combinations cannot be understood with reference to the usual dichotomous, structural variables on which the literature has long relied, but require instead greater attention to the coalitional foundations on which political-economic institutions rest. A coalitional approach reveals that institutions that in the past supported the more egalitarian varieties of capitalism survive best not when they stably reproduce the politics and patterns of the Golden Era but rather when they are reconfigured—in both form and function—on the basis of significantly new political support coalitions.

Run of the Red Queen: Government, Innovation, Globalization and Economic Growth in China – By Dan Breznitz and Michael Murphree

Run of the Red Queen: Government, Innovation, Globalization and Economic Growth in China – By Dan Breznitz and Michael Murphree

Skills and Industrial Relations in Coordinated Market Economies - Continuing Vocational Training in Denmark, the Netherlands, Austria and Switzerland

This article offers the first systematic study of the institutional and political conditions under which collective agreements finance and organize continuing vocational training (CVT). Combining Mill's methods of agreement and difference with pattern matching, it identifies proactive small and medium enterprises, proactive public policies, proactive trade unions, and links between CVT and wage bargaining as probable conditions for CVT by collective labour agreement. The most important finding is that the research on the development of political–economic institutions in coordinated market economies has to analyse more carefully how state activities and the behaviour of small and medium-sized firms affect the coordination of economic activities in skills formation.

Human Footprints on the Global Environment

no abstract Copyright Information: All rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. Contact the author or original publisher for any necessary permissions. eScholarship is not the copyright owner for deposited works. Learn more at http://www.escholarship.org/help_copyright.html#reuse Review Human Footprints on the Global Environment. By Rosa A. Eugene, Andreas Diekmann, Thomas Dietz, and Carlo C. Jaeger, (Eds.) Reviewed by Enzo Ferrara Istituto Nazionale di Ricerca Metrologica, Torino, Italy. Rosa A. Eugene, Andreas Diekmann, Thomas Dietz, and Carlo C. Jaeger, (Eds.). Human Footprints on the Global Environment. MIT Press, 2010. xi + 329 pp., 11 illus. ISBN: 978-0-262-01315-4. US $27.00 paperback, alkaline paper. Environmental sociology explains that societies are at the same time collective human enterprises and complex ecosystems, each one depending upon the other. Societies cannot function without ecosystem resources as well as ecosystems cannot remain viable indefinitely if humankind stands unmindful of its own impact on the environment that surrounds its extension. Yet, most theories of ecological impact dogmatically assume that exploitation of the environment provides in any case benefits to human well-being. As a result, while the colossal human footprint actually threatens the sustainability of the entire planet, the conventional indicators of human development – such as GDP – still inform policy on the base only of economic growth, which has proved to be largely inadequate to meet the challenges of the 21st century. Thus, new meters of human well-being should be favoured along with instruments to evaluate how far we are from achieving sustainable and socially inclusive economies, and to let the welfare provided with human activities fit with a healthy planet in our days and in the future. Although it is the subject to much empirical discipline, the question of how to assess the concept of sustainability remains vexing. One point is clear: scale matters, and scientists, policymakers, and other observers know that any understanding of the causes of the ecological decay is a function of appreciating the range of human choices and actions that affect the environment. “Human Footprints on the Global Environment”, tackles this challenge and offers a state-ofthe-art assessment of research on the human dimensions of the global risks. After reminding how the concept of human footprint emerged – from the “Brundtland Report” (1987) and the foundation of the IPCC (1988) to the novel notion of “Coupled Human and Natural Systems” (2007) –, the introductive chapter, “Global transformations”, defines the book rationale, i.e. assessing knowledge about the dynamics of coupled human and natural systems with an emphasis on their human dimension. Five major social variables are identified as key human forces affecting the environment, namely population change, economic growth, technological choices, political-economic institutions, attitudes and beliefs. Subsequent contributions offer interpretive frameworks for appreciating the global crisis. For example, the “Progress in the study of land use change” (Ch.4) reviews such notions as population, consumption, institutional actions, and culture about land cover and use with an outlook for the next decades. “The effectiveness of Ferrara: Human Footprints on the Global Environment

Co-evolution of skills and welfare in coordinated market economies? A comparative historical analysis of Denmark, the Netherlands and Switzerland

The Varieties of Capitalism literature argues that different forms of market economies, skill systems and welfare regimes are causally related, because preferences follow a logic of asset-specific investment. This article demonstrates the strength of comparative historical analysis in supplementing the human capital investment model by a more contextualized perspective. The main argument is that both the evolution of training regimes and the development of unemployment insurance schemes are primarily governed by a logic of organization-building by capital and labour. This logic is mediated by trajectories of industrialization, patterns of state intervention in the labour market and the institutionalization of labour relations. Our understanding of relationships between political-economic institutions should be open to variable paths leading to co-evolutionary developments.

Varieties of corporate social responsibility (CSR): CSR meets the “Nordic Model”

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is increasingly being promoted as an instrument for global governance to address the regulatory vacuum surrounding transnational business activities and as a method for encouraging business to contribute to sustainable development at the national level. Originally a business-driven, American concept, CSR has now been adopted and promoted by a wide range of governments and multilateral institutions. However, the socio-political model underlying CSR is far from neutral and may conflict with existing models in the societies in which it is introduced. In this article a typology of possible governmental interpretations of CSR is developed, and how CSR is transformed and adapted in its meeting with Nordic governments in order to fit the “Nordic Model” of state-market-society relations is analyzed. The analysis suggests that pre-existing political-economic institutions and cultural norms deeply affect the interpretation of CSR, and that this, when combined with ongoing national political processes, leads to a highly transformed concept of CSR.

Variety of Modes of Governance of a Global Value Chain: The Case of Tourism from Holland to Turkey

Global value chains analysis has become an ever more important approach in economics and economic geography to study the globalization of different sectors. However, it is largely ignored in tourism research. This paper examines the modes of governance of the tourism value chain from Holland to Turkey. One of the most striking findings of this paper is the large variety of governance modes of that chain, not only within the same market segment but even within one firm. The second important finding is the importance of the specific context of the inbound country, to a much lesser extent than the outbound country. In other words, the chain is strongly embedded in the national/local political economic institutions of the inbound country but is fairly disembedded from those of the outbound country.

The Greenhouse Development Rights Framework: Drawing Attention to Inequality within Nations in the Global Climate Policy Debate

ABSTRACTThe urgency of the climate problem seems to require that stringent emissions reductions begin under the political economic institutions that currently exist. Any global climate treaty must, however, at least not make global inequality worse, and ideally should embody desirable principles of justice. The Greenhouse Development Rights framework (GDRs), described briefly here, is a proposal for such a fair division of the burdens of emissions reductions and adaptation to climate change that won't be avoided, based on an assessment of capacity (ability to pay) and responsibility (contribution to the problem). The GDRs considers both inequality within countries and inequality between countries: national obligations are based on the exemption of poor individuals (under a ‘development threshold’) from global burdens. GDRs accepts the link between ‘development’ and the growth in consumption of the world's poor majority, an obvious requirement if it is to be taken seriously by Southern governments intent on ‘development as usual’. It also does not directly challenge the institutions of capitalism or the sovereignty of nation states. Nonetheless, in its focus on poor and rich people it is consistent with a class‐based rather than nation‐based approach to economic justice. We conclude by raising a variety of questions both about the limits of approaches like GDRs, and the need for policies that address climate change even during or after a transition beyond the current global capitalist regime.

The origin of corporate social responsibility: global forces or national legacies?

This paper explores the relative importance of global forces and national political-economic institutions for companies' willingness and ability to engage in corporate social responsibility (CSR). The globalist hypothesis postulates that a company's CSR efforts are a function of the dictates of the global market place: strong anti-globalization and anti-corporate sentiments generate a need for a positive reputation to obtain a ‘social license to operate’. The institutionalist hypothesis postulates that a company's CSR efforts are a function of institutional factors in the national political-economic system: companies based in political-economic systems with strong institutions for social embedding of the economy have comparative institutional advantages for success in CSR. The hypotheses are examined quantitatively by testing an index of national CSR performance against well-established political-economic indicators. The final analysis, based on qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), reveals causal heterogeneity and indicates two separate pathways leading to CSR success.

Putting the Political Back into Political Economy by Bringing the State Back in Yet Again

Dominant theoretical approaches in political economy today, whether they posit convergence to neoliberal capitalism, binary divergence of capitalisms, or tripartite differentiation of financial governance, downplay the importance of state action. Their methodological approaches, rational choice and historical institutionalism, tend to reinforce their substantive theories either by disaggregating the state into its historical institutional components or by focusing on the strategic actions of its rational actors. This article argues that by not taking state action seriously, they are unable to explain the differences in degree and kind of countries' neoliberal reforms. For this, it is necessary to bring the state back in and to put the political back into political economy not just in terms of political economic institutions but also in terms of policies, polity, and politics. To explore the political in all its variety, however, the article demonstrates that at least one more methodological approach, discursive institutionalism, is also needed. This approach, by taking the role of ideas and discourse seriously, brings political actors as sentient beings back in. This in turn also enables the author to explain the dynamics of neoliberal reform in political economy.

Endogenous Preferences: The Political Consequences of Economic Institutions

This paper studies the broad left-right voting patterns across Western democracies since 1960. Using a novel data set for the median voter, the paper finds that voting behaviour is closely related to the presence of specific political-economic institutions. Labour organization, skill specificity, and public sector employment are associated with left-right voting behaviour and the presence of institutional complementarities may thus influence electoral outcomes. This research therefore suggests that coordinated and liberal market economies generate economic incentives that help sustain the broadly observed left-right voting patterns. Statistical analyses indicate that revealed voter preferences are endogenous to the variety of capitalism although reverse causality cannot be fully ruled out. This paper places political economy at the heart of voting behaviour and implies the existence of institutional advantages to partisan politics.

Shifting agrifood systems: the contemporary geography of food and agriculture; an introduction

It is our pleasure in this special issue to introduce something of the recent progress and current state of agrifood studies in geography. At the time of writing agricultural markets around the world are again in upheaval. Steadily increasing demand for feed and fuel-stocks is pushing the prices of cereals and oilseeds to their highest levels in decades. Despite record harvests, shrinking food stocks bring the fear of food shortage to an age very recently characterized by surplus production and dependably cheap (some claim too cheap) food (Economist 2007). The meat industry is in simultaneous expansion and retrenchment: demand for meat is soaring in East Asia and Latin America (Delgado et al. 1999), while one in a series of industry-wide sanitation violations recently forced a leading manufacturer of frozen hamburgers in the US out of business (NY Times 2007, see also NY Times 2008). Meanwhile, with few exceptions, rural places are poor places (IFAD 2001), and calls for resource conservation on the one hand and trade liberalization and economic efficiency on the other threaten the land-based livelihoods of rural peoples around the world (e.g. Green et al. 2005; Tilman et al. 2002; Waggoner 1996). With sudden prominence, the fundamental aspects of agricultural production— where, how, and what ought to be produced and consumed—are in question. Suffice it to say that the agricultural sector and the research fields concerned with food and agriculture are in fascinating flux, and perhaps at important crossroads. Although food and agriculture have long been of interest across a range of disciplines (e.g. Braudel 1973; Goody 1982; Mintz 1986; Montanari 1996; Netting 1993), geographers and sociologists have been particularly active in exploring what we describe here as the field of agrifood studies. In this introduction we would like to review recent progress in this field and provide a brief outline of the perspectives and debates of relevance to this issue. Much of the current geographic work on food and agriculture can be traced back to a body of scholarship concerned with describing the structural dimensions of what was gradually seen to be a dominant, exclusive, and global-scale post-War system of food production and consumption (Friedmann and McMichael 1989; Goodman and Watts 1997). Such studies emphasized interlinked description of the novel social, ideological and political-economic institutions that accompanied the industrialization of agriculture and the projection of this industrial model around the world (Friedmann 1982; Goodman and Redclift 1989; Heffernan and D. Niles (&) National Museum of Ethnology, Senri Expo Park, Suita City, Osaka 565–8511, Japan e-mail: daniel.niles@gmail.com

A hard slog, not a leap frog: Globalization and sustainability transitions in developing Asia

How does globalization influence transitions toward more sustainable socio-technical regimes in the developing world? This paper argues that transformations of regimes, the networks and institutions governing technological and environmental practices in an industry, can be positively influenced by globalization but it depends on how global forces interact with local socio-political landscapes—the political–economic institutions, values, and regulations broadly guiding an economy and its relationship to the environment. We evaluate these relationships through a comparison of two kinds of socio-political landscapes—the neo-liberal export-led development model commonly found in the developing world and the uniquely Asian capitalist developmental state. We first show how the neo-liberal model overemphasizes the power of market forces to facilitate upgrading and more sustainable industrialization. We then argue that capitalist developmental states in East and Southeast Asia have been better able to harness global economic forces for technological and sustainability transitions through an openness to trade and investment and effective public–private institutions able to link cleaner technologies and environmental standards to production activities in firms. We buttress this argument with firm-level evidence showing the evolution of socio-technical regimes in two industries—cement and electronics. The case studies demonstrate how interactions with OECD firms can contribute to environmental technique effects provided the socio-political landscape is amenable to changes in an industry's regime. Ultimately, we find the process of transition to be complex and contingent; a hard slog not a leap frog toward a potentially more sustainable future. We close by considering the limitations on the capitalist developmental state model and with comments about what else needs to be learned about globalization's role in sustainability transitions.

The difference principle and time

Rawls's difference principle contains a certain normative ambiguity, so that opposing views, including strong inegalitarian ones, might find a home under it. The element that introduces this indeterminacy is the absence of an explicit reference to time. Thus, a society that agrees on the difference principle as the proper justification of basic political-economic institutions, might nevertheless disagree on whether their specific institutions are justified by that principle. Such disagreement would most often centre on issues of fact: will a more egalitarian policy in fact prioritize the least well off or will a more libertarian policy do so? But facts are not the only possible points of contention. According to the fundamental indeterminacy, considering merely the sum of advantages to the least well off, the difference principle is indifferent among different flows of equal income over time. It cannot adjudicate among more or less unequal distributions across social groups when the sum income of the least advantaged group is constant. The fundamental indeterminacy lies at the bottom of three derivative indeterminacies: an adequate future discount rate, an acceptable absolute minimum, and a reasonable time interval. These might form the basis of political disagreement among self-proclaimed endorsers of the difference principle of left and right over the way the principal social-economic institutions ought to be structured and the distributions that ensue.

A tale of two institutions: Shaping Oświęcim-Auschwitz

For the last sixty years, two institutions have shaped the destiny of the town of Oświęcim in southern Poland. One of these institutions is globally recognised, its history and development widely researched; the other is well known only amongst Polish industrialists, perhaps Polish economic geographers, and amongst the people of Oświęcim. These two institutions are the Auschwitz State Museum and the chemical firm Dwory SA. Both institutions have their roots in the German Occupation of Poland 1939–1945. This paper presents the tale of these two institutions in order not only to highlight the need to embed memorial sites in their wider contexts, but also to indicate the impact of such sites as political–economic institutions, with the influence to shape social and economic landscapes. In laying out the geographies of the town and its two major institutions, we draw attention to the ways in which Holocaust memorialisation and post-socialist transformation are articulated with each other, not only here in Oświęcim, and also with wider processes of social, economic, political and cultural change.

The Priority of Democracy: A Pragmatist Approach to Political-Economic Institutions and the Burden of Justification

Politics reflects a seemingly incontrovertible condition—any imaginable human population is diverse across multiple, overlapping dimensions including material interests, moral and ethical commitments, and cultural attachments. Such diversity means, in turn, that disagreement and conflict are unavoidable. Under these circumstances politics largely consists in contests over the contours of shared institutional arrangements. Given that there almost always are a number of ways to institutionalize social interaction, any population occupying the circumstances of politics must determine which institutional form or arrangement to rely on in any particular domain. The “priority” of democracy, on our account, derives from its usefulness in approaching this crucial task. This priority derives from features that are, in our view, unique to democracy, namely a level of reflexivity that distinguishes it from other ways of coordinating ongoing social interaction. As we demonstrate, much of the literature on social institutions tacitly and improperly privileges a quite different component of our institutional arrangements, namely markets. We show that once one clarifies the premises and argumentative strategies common to this literature, it simply is not possible to sustain the privilege it accords to markets. In fact, we argue that the analytical models and explanatory strategies that institutionalists deploy actually sustain our case for the priority of democracy.