ABSTRACT
Recent globalization of the world economy has raised the question of which type of economic system will be able to survive in this new environment of unprecedented competitiveness. Some argue for the superiority of the market-based economic systems of Anglo-Saxon countries, whereas others maintain that the German, Japanese, and Scandinavian economies, in which strategic coordination among social partners (e.g., employers, trade unions, and banks) plays a key role, are at least equally as competitive. In this debate on the “varieties of capitalism (VoC),” Hall and Soskice (2001) called the market-coordinated economic system of Anglo-Saxon countries “liberal market economy (LME)” and contrasted them with the strategically coordinated German and Japanese economies, which they called “coordinated market economies (CMEs).” One of the most interesting recent developments in this field of comparative capitalisms is empirical testing of the claim that the types of democracy (majoritarian vs. consensus) are associated with these two opposing VoC, LME and CME (e.g., Gourevitch and Shinn 2005). In these studies, both the type of democracy and VoC are conceptualized as fixed systems rather than the ones that undergo a process of transformation. However, recently, researchers have questioned the adequacy of such a conceptualization. Many studies on the “hybridization” of CME have cast doubts on the contemporary validity of the clear LME–CME distinction of advanced economies proposed by Hall and Soskice (2001) (Campbell and Pedersen 2007; Deeg and Jackson 2007; Jackson 2005). On the other hand, the electoral reforms in countries such as Italy, Japan, and New Zealand in the 1990s (D’Alimonte 2005; Katz 2005; Reed 2005; Vowles 2005) and the growing political importance of new right-wing parties have transformed the party systems – one of the key components of the type of democracy – of several European countries (Kriesi et al. 2008). 1
