ABSTRACT

We argued in Chapter 1 that institutions, consisting of rules and rule- like resources, play a centrally important role in determining a country’s trajectory, through their influence on the behaviour of actors within the political and economic system. To address the empirical ‘puzzle’ of the contrasting experiences of the six Anglo-Saxon financial systems during the 2008 financial crisis, we considered how institutional configurations within each country – and within their financial systems, in particular – might have influenced the outcomes associated with the parallel processes of neo-liberalization and financialization, unleashed by the paradigm shift of the 1970s. In the course of this macro institutional change, we saw institutional complementarities inherent in each country’s political economy as playing a key role in shaping the processes of institutional reproduction (reinforcement of dominant institutional arrangements) and institutional change (displacement of previously dominant institutional arrangements); and we identified institutional layering (the introduction of new institutions on top of or alongside existing ones) and institutional drift (institutional change resulting from changes in the environment) as being potentially influential modes of institutional change.