Governing Growth (the Postwar Transformations Of Capitalism And Democracy)

By (author) Hall, Peter A.
Short description/annotation:
A groundbreaking account of how politics and economics have interacted in Western democracies over the past eighty years.
Description:

A groundbreaking account of how politics and economics have interacted in Western democracies over the past eighty years

How do capitalist economies change over time? And what political consequences follow? In Governing Growth, Peter Hall traces the interactions between politics and economics in Western democracies over the past eighty years, identifying a series of profound shifts in the political economies of Europe and the United States. Hall develops the concept of successive growth regimes, each the result of public policies interacting with the strategies of private firms. Alongside each growth regime, he argues, there is a distinctive representation regime, which determines whose voices have the most influence over public policy. Showing how these two regimes interact, he develops a new account of the processes through which political economies change over time.

Hall outlines three postwar growth regimes: an era of modernization, from 1945 to about 1975; an era of liberalization, from 1980 to the late 1990s; and an era of knowledge-based growth, beginning at the turn of the century. His sweeping analysis sheds new light not only on the relationship between capitalism and democracy, but also on the roots of our contemporary political dilemmas.

Biographical note:
Peter A. Hall is the Krupp Foundation Professor of European Studies at Harvard University. His previous books include Governing the Economy, The Political Power of Economic Ideas (Princeton), and Varieties of Capitalism.
Endorsement:
“Forty years ago Peter Hall’s Governing the Economy set the agenda for comparative political economy. Forty years later Governing Growth has done it again. In it, Hall details how the ‘economic gestalt’ of a period interacts with the institutions of an economy to produce particular pathways to growth, and sometimes to stagnation. The result is the most compelling account of postwar growth I know.”—Mark Blyth, Brown University

“Peter Hall’s Governing Growth is a tour de force. Ranging widely over time and across advanced political economies, Hall provides a powerful new theory of how capitalism and democracy interact and change over time.”—Kathleen Thelen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

“Emphasizing commonalities across liberal democracies, Governing Growth sets out an original and extremely persuasive account of how capitalism and electoral politics have evolved in tandem since the end of the Second World War. I cannot think of a more important book on this topic.”—Jonas Pontusson, Université de Genève