Bruno Wueest's Politics of Economic Liberalization is a timely contribution to the literature on comparative political economy and policy discourse. Employing an array of statistical techniques to analyze statements made by various political actors in six West European countries, Wueest sheds new and welcome light on old debates concerning policy convergence and divergence, institutional complementarities and comparative advantage, political polarization, access and representation. Most importantly, Wueest's methodological contribution can scarcely be understated, as quantitative discourse analysis has begun to push the frontiers of social science, blurring the lines between qualitative and quantitative methods (see also Leifeld 2013; Muller 2015). Wueest's objective is to inductively reveal how discourses on economic liberalization play out as the policy process unfolds in Germany, Austria, France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Switzerland. Drawing on Schmidt's (2008) work on discursive institutionalism, Wueest analyzes covariation in the discourse by country, action arena and actor type. Specifically, the research is concerned with explaining variance across “four discursive actions”, in each of three stages of the policy process, with respect to access and functionality. The four discursive actions are described by Wueest as going public, position taking, valence attribution, and framing. The three stages of the policy process are identified as input, output and janus-faced, the latter of which I understand to mean throughput. Access refers to the diversity of actors engaged in the policy discourse at different stages of the policy process, while functionality refers to whether the discourse is coordinative (i.e., concerned with negotiation and deliberation) or communicative (i.e., concerned with information dissemination and legitimization). The research is based primarily on core sentence annotation (CSA) of statements published in major newspapers between 2004 and 2006, although important findings concerning convergence and polarization are derived from electoral campaign statements made during the 1970-2000 period. The CSA method involves human coding of text-based statements across a number of dimensions, the most consequential of which are valence polarity and dominant frames. Validity is promoted by way of intercoder reliability checks. Scores are then subjected to a variety of statistical tests, from factor analysis to k-means clustering, wherein the independent variables represent country, actor type, action arena and stage of the policy process. The book generates three major findings. The first major finding is that, while there is a discernable “pro-market mainstream” to the discourse in Western Europe, it is not hegemonic. Rather, as Thelen (2014) has observed, “varieties of liberalization” are unfolding in Western Europe. Importantly, Wueest finds that the pro-market agenda factor loads on two dimensions — domestic liberalization and international liberalization — the latter of which is prioritized and pursued most forcefully, mainly by EU actors, national executives and global players, all of whom also make frequent use of interventionist frames under the auspices of market regulation (p. 103). The suggestion is that the pro-market mainstream is not primarily driven by free market ideology, but instead technical ideas and arguments regarding how markets ought to be regulated. Yet, Wueest's analysis of policy positions and mobilization efforts during electoral campaigns in the 1970-2000 period also reveals increasing polarization between the political extremes. Finer grained analysis into extreme position-taking using data from 2004-2006 turns up a second major finding concerning heterogeneous motives of populist constituencies: namely, that the discursive thread uniting opposition to the pro-market mainstream is tenuous at best (see also Rooduijn 2018). Consistent with Varieties of Capitalism and other institutionalist perspectives, the third major finding is that accessibility and functionality of the discourse varies according to institutional constraints and opportunities (cf. Hall and Soskice 2001). In Wueest's words, “heterogeneous coalition settings” across countries cause the pro-market mainstream to be “differently integrated into the public spheres of the single countries” (p. 104). Consequently, the discourse in France's state-dominated political economy is most antithetical to the pro-market mainstream. Meanwhile, the significance of “oppositional coalitions” (e.g., the traditional left, protectionist right, “third way” social democrats) varies across countries along with political representation. In this way, Wueest's analysis affirms the conventional wisdom that policy discourse is more accessible, more conflict-laden and more coordinative in institutionally-dense systems. Inversely, policy discourse is more exclusive, less conflictual, and more communicative in institutionally-lean systems (cf. Lijphart 2012; Tsebelis 2002). Although Wueest's study is a significant contribution to political economy scholarship, more could be made of synergies between the study's findings and the current state of the art. Is Wueest's contribution in or out of alignment with power resources theory, punctuated equilibrium theory, state theory and actor-centred institutionalism? I am inclined to view Wueest's contribution as conciliatory, bringing together what are often considered to be divergent perspectives. For instance, Sum and Jessop (2013: 61) argue that actor-centred institutionalism scores high relative to other popular perspectives on political economy, but they also note that actor-centred institutionalism does not take adequate stock of discourse. If quantitative discourse analysis is the missing link preventing the articulation of a unified and testable theory of political economy, this is big news that warrants discussion. Along similar lines, one of the most nagging problems for social scientists hitherto is that preferences and their ideational antecedents are difficult to operationalize and, thus, difficult to measure and observe. Wueest has made considerable progress by advancing a systematic and replicable approach to analyzing policy discourse. However, many of the concepts employed by Wueest — such as going public, position taking, framing and valence attribution — can and should be married with concepts germane to the agenda-setting literature: viz., mobilization, dimensionality, rhetoric and heresthetics (Baumgartner and Jones 2015). There is no reason why these literatures should stand separately despite analyzing the same phenomena. It's time they be integrated. For the sake of cumulative theory building and the advancement of knowledge, it is important that future research builds upon and challenges Wueest's work. The next step in the research programme is replication and extension of Wueest's analysis using a variety supervised and unsupervised machine learning techniques, which are quickly coming online. There is no doubt that quantitative discourse analysis will proliferate in coming years. Students of political economy can thus look forward to further systematic research on ideas and discourse surrounding economic liberalization in Western Europe and beyond. In many respects, Wueest's work has merely scratched the surface of what will hopefully be a lengthy research programme and scholarly debate — and one that will make ample use of a full suite of analytical tools rapidly becoming available to social scientists.