Over the past four decades, the accumulation of policy legacies and public debt has led to a decline in fiscal flexibility in Germany and the United States. By applying an index of fiscal democracy to Germany, the paper illustrates the associated shrinkage of democratic control over budget...

In recent years, parallel trends of organizational restructuring have become manifest among trade unions. Sharing similar experiences of stagnant membership and falling density rates, coupled with structural shifts in employment from industry to services and a growing pressure to attend to the...

European industrial relations are rapidly internationalizing; internationalization, however, is not necessarily de-nationalization. Even as European integration accelerates, national politics and industrial relations will remain the principal arenas for the social regulation of work and...

Drawing on extensive comparison with the United States, Japan and Britain, the paper describes the "German model" of advanced capitalism as an institutionalized high-wage economy combining high competitiveness in world markets with strong social cohesion and, in particular, low levels of...

This paper outlines an institutionalist political economy approach to capitalism as a specific type of social order. Social science institutionalism considers social systems to be structured by sanctioned rules of obligatory behavior. Its perspective is one of collective ordering, or governance,...

The paper reviews the origins of the comparative study of capitalism and of the diverse approaches applied to it in contemporary political economy. It distinguishes four models accounting for differences in the institutional make-up of national capitalist economies, which it refers to as the...

The paper presents a theoretical outline for a cross-national comparative study of business associations. It identifies two clusters of independent variables that are assumed to affect the structure of intermediary organizations: properties of the represented group (Logic of Membership) and...

The dissolution of the standard employment relationship since the 1970s has been paralleled by a destabilization of family relations. The paper, which is a slightly revised version of a plenary lecture at the 2008 Meeting of the German Sociological Association, discusses possible connections...

The paper is a contribution to a book edited by Simon Green and Willie Paterson, Semi-sovereignty Revisited: Governance, Institutions and Policies in United Germany. The book will appear in 2003 or 2004. It explores to what extent Peter Katzenstein's seminal study of the semi-sovereign German...