Precedence for the unprecedented: A comparative institutionalist view of the financial crisis

This essay argues for a sociopolitical approach to the study of the current financial crisis in the United States and other advanced industrialized countries. Such an approach offers a bridge between economic sociology and historical institutionalism that can help analysts identify the ways in which relevant public and private actors experiment with institutional mechanisms that help resolve stock and flow problems as well as consider alternative regulatory forms. In particular, I suggest how comparative analysis and considerations of political struggles can improve our notion of embeddedness and assessment of both proximate solutions and longer term paths of adjustment.