In most rich democracies one finds a tendency for the share in public finance that is available for discretionary spending to shrink. This is because tax revenues do not keep pace with simultaneous increases in fixed expenditures and growing pressures for fiscal consolidation. The present paper...

Wolfgang Streeck has written extensively on comparative political economy and institutional theory. In this book he addresses some of the key issues in this field: the role of history in institutional analysis, the dynamics of slow institutional change, the limitations of rational design and...

Debates surrounding institutional change have become increasingly central to Political Science, Management Studies, and Sociology, opposing the role of globalization in bringing about a convergence of national economies and institutions on one model to theories about 'Varieties of Capitalism'....

Die Arbeitsgruppe Beschäftigung der von NRW-Ministerpräsident Jürgen Rüttgers eingesetzten "Zukunftskommission" hat umfassende Empfehlungen für die künftige Wirtschafts- und Arbeitsmarktpolitik in Nordrhein-Westfalen vorgelegt. Das Papier der von IZA-Direktor Klaus F. Zimmermann geleiteten...

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...

A longer-term perspective reveals the historical exhaustion of the financial resources of the democratic interventionist state of the postwar period. German politics present and future is shaped by a deep crisis of public finance. Its current expression is an apparently insurmountable conflict...

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...

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,...

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...