Peter Lange

Continuity and change in contemporary capitalism

In the early 1980s, many observers, argued that powerful organized economic interests and social democratic parties created successful mixed economies promoting economic growth, full employment, and a modicum of social equality. The present book assembles scholars with formidable expertise in the study of advanced capitalist politics and political economy to reexamine this account from the vantage point of the second half of the 1990s. The authors find that the conventional wisdom no longer adequately reflects the political and economic realities. Advanced democracies have responded in path-dependent fashion to such novel challenges as technological change, intensifying international competition, new social conflict, and the erosion of established patterns of political mobilization. The book rejects, however, the currently widespread expectation that ‘internationalization’ makes all democracies converge on similar political and economic institutions and power relations. Diversity among capitalist democracies persists, though in a different fashion than in the ‘Golden Age’ of rapid economic growth after World War II.

GOVERNMENT PARTISANSHIP, LABOR ORGANIZATION, AND MACROECONOMIC PERFORMANCE

Governments of the Left and Right have distinct partisan economic policies and objectives that they would prefer to pursue. Their propensity to do so, however, is constrained by their desire for reelection. We argue that the ability of governments to further their partisan interests and preside over reelectable macroeconomic outcomes simultaneously is dependent on the organization of the domestic economy, particularly the labor movement. We hypothesize that there are two different paths to desirable macroeconomic performance. In countries with densely and centrally organized labor movements, leftist governments can promote economic growth and reduce inflation and unemployment. Conversely, in countries with weak labor movements, rightist governments can pursue their partisan-preferred macroeconomic strategies and achieve similarly beneficial macroeconomic outcomes. Performance will be poorer in other cases. These hypotheses are supported by analysis of pooled annual time series data for 16 advanced industrial democracies between 1967 and 1984.

The Politics of Growth: Strategic Interaction and Economic Performance in the Advanced Industrial Democracies, 1974-1980

Much contemporary research in political economy has stressed the importance of the political power of the Left and the organization of labor on economic performance among the advanced industrial democracies. This paper argues that the impact of each variable on performance, operationalized as proportionate change in economic growth rates, 1974-1980, is conditional upon the relative presence or absence of the other. Specifically, encompassing labor organization is only positively associated with growth when accompanied by Left control of government, and Left governments only have a positive impact on economic growth when labor is highly and centrally organized. Conversely, when either variable is only weakly present, the impact of the other on economic growth is negative.

Political responses to interdependence: what's “left” for the left?

Heightened economic interdependence in recent years is commonly argued to have generated great pressures for convergence in economic policies across the advanced industrial democracies. Interdependence has clearly had a great impact on the types of economic policies that governments can pursue: they have been unable to pursue independent fiscal and monetary policies since the mid-1970s. Furthermore, all governments have been forced to attempt to promote the competitiveness of national goods and services in world markets and to increase the speed and efficiency with which national producers adjust to changes in global markets. There are, however, different policies consistent with these goals. Statistical analyses of economic policies since the mid-1970s show that governments of the left and the right continue to be able to enact distinctive supply-side policies that promote competitiveness and flexible adjustment and simultaneously further their partisan objectives.

Unions, Employers' Associations, and Wage-Setting Institutions in Northern and Central Europe, 1950–1992

The eight countries examined in this study—Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden—have long been viewed as exemplifying “corporatist” industrial relations systems, in which union coverage is high, unions are influential and commonly have strong ties to political parties, and collective bargaining is institutionalized and relatively centralized. Many observers have recently argued that such corporatist bargaining institutions are everywhere being undermined by changes in the global economy. The authors, using data from a wide variety of primary and secondary sources, test whether changes in patterns of wage-setting in the private sector are consistent with that claim. Although they find some signs that corporatist wage-setting institutions are in decline, they also find offsetting signs of the resiliency of such institutions. Overall, the evidence does not indicate that wage-setting in the private sector is undergoing a general process of decentralization in these eight countries.

Where Have All the Members Gone? Globalization, Institutions, and Union Density

There have been widespread claims in recent years about the effects of economic globalization on domestic politics and, in particular, its negative impact on wage earners and trade unions. A number of recent studies have raised serious questions about the validity of claims that the globalization of trade and financial markets leads to international convergence around a neoliberal market economic model. This article considers the impact of economic institutional arrangements on union membership trends in sixteen industrial democracies between 1960 and 1994. We find that the effects of economic globalization are marginal and conditional on particular economic institutions, which helps to explain divergent trends in union density among these countries. These differences suggest that the way national economies operate may continue to diverge.

Government Partisanship, Labor Organization, and Macroeconomic Performance: A Corrigendum

Alvarez, Garrett and Lange (1991) used cross-national data panel data on the Organization for Economic Coordination and Development nations to show that countries with left governments and encompassing labor movements enjoyed superior economic performance. Here we show that the standard errors reported in that article are incorrect. Reestimation of the model using ordinary least squares and robust standard errors upholds the major finding of Alvarez, Garrett and Lange, regarding the political and institutional causes of economic growth but leaves the findings for unemployment and inflation open to question. We show that the model used by Alvarez, Garrett and Lange, feasible generalized least squares, cannot produce standard errors when the number of countries analyzed exceeds the length of the time period under analysis. Also, we argue that ordinary least squares with robust standard errors is superior to feasible generalized least square for typical cross-national panel studies.

Performance in a Hostile World: Economic Growth in Capitalist Democracies, 1974–1982

Many recent studies argue that labor organization and government partisanship were important determinants of the economic performance of the advanced industrial democracies during stagflation. They do not, however, take into account the potential impact on performance of position in the international economy; the relationships reported may therefore be largely spurious. Even when the strong effects of international position, most notably the extent of dependence on imported sources of oil, were controlled for, domestic political structures remained powerful determinants of economic performance during stagflation. “Corporatist” political economies dominated by leftist governments in which labor movements were densely and centrally organized, and “market” political economies in which labor was much weaker and rightist governments were predominant, performed significantly better than the less coherent cases in which the power of labor was distributed asymmetrically between politics and the market.

Government Partisanship and Economic Performance: When and How does “Who Governs” Matter?

This article responds to Jackmans central theoretical and empirical criticisms of our research. First, the policy convergence thesis is far less persuasive than Jackman asserts and there is strong theoretical support for our original argument. Second, the empirical tests presented by Jackman are not as conclusive as he suggests. The Norwegian outlier is better remedied on Jackmans own terms by controlling for oil dependence than by exclusion from the analysis. Once this is done the data are more supportive of our thesis. Finally, we suggest that a pooled time series, cross-section design may provide better tests for our argument than those presently in debate.

Mobilization, Social Movements and Party Recruitment: The Italian Communist Party since the 1960s

Political life in the advanced industrial democracies since the Second World War has been characterized by periods of mass mobilization and protest followed by years of relative quiescence and institutional dominance. The individual phases have prompted extensive reflection. Far less attention, however, has been devoted to how developments in one phase might influence the subsequent one. Using data from a 1979 survey of activists of the Italian Communist Party, this article examines how the cycle of protest which swept Italy in the late-1960s and early-1970s was reflected in the distribution of attitudes towards dissent within the different generations of party activists. Our findings clearly suggest that participation in social movements had independent effects on the presence of particular tolerance attitudes and that phases of mobilization affect the distribution of politically salient attitudes among party activists during a subsequent phase of institutionalization. This, in turn, has possible implications for processes of change in the Italian political system.