Ben Clift

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at University of Warwick

This article reassesses the neo-liberal shift within British economic policy-making and the international political economy, focusing especially the role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the 1960s. The IMF has always used the conditions attached to its lending to try and shape borrower's policy; here we explore the evolving content of th...

This article advances the case for the more systematic incorporation of ideational factors into comparative capitalisms analysis as a corrective to the rational choice proclivities of the Varieties of Capitalism approach. It demonstrates the pay-off of such an ideationally attuned approach through analysis of French capitalist restructuring over th...

The demise of a post-war Keynesian policy paradigm of discretionary fiscal fine-tuning in pursuit of full employment is widely associated with the rise of a monetarist economic policy paradigm stressing fixed policy rules and money supply targets to secure price stability. Challenging these conventional wisdoms, and questioning the usefulness of th...

Belying the IMF’s reputation as a bastion of neo-liberal policy orthodoxy, this article analyses important yet contingent transformations in IMF fiscal policy thinking which constituted a key intervention in international austerity debates. Applying only to advanced economies, and in the specific post-crash conditions, the Fund came to champion fis...

This article critiques and builds upon first-wave (Höpner and Schäfer 2010. A new phase of European integration: organised capitalisms in post-Ricardian Europe. West European Politics, 33 (2), 344–368) and second-wave (Johnston and Regan 2018 Johnston, A. and Regan, A., 2018. Introduction: is the European Union capable of integrating diverse models...

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is a pivotal multilateral institution in global economic governance tasked with ensuring monetary stability and preventing financial crises through promoting balanced trade, economic growth, and poverty reduction. IMF research and expertise also play a powerful normative role in shaping the contours of economic...

This paper brings insights into ideational robustness to bear on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) fiscal policy thinking. It advances understanding of both the IMF and the concept of ideational robustness by focusing on economic ideas as they are put into practice by expert economic institutions. The IMF has traditionally enjoyed a reputation...

This contribution explores how technocratic economic governance rests on underlying principles of political economy—normatively informed judgements about how the economy and policy operate. It shines light on how fiscal councils such as the OBR can open up (or close down) policy possibilities through the way they narrate economic crises, the trajec...

This article places the Office for Budget Responsibility's commentary on the March 2023 UK Budget in political context. It explores how increased independent expert input has transformed the UK economic policy regime, focussing on the complex relationship between rules‐based economic governance, independent oversight and fiscal discipline. The tech...

This book is about the politics of economic ideas, and the inevitable yet hidden politics of technocratic economic governance, explored through a focus on the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR)—the institution designed to oversee Britain’s fiscal policy. Drawing on an in-depth qualitative analysis of official documents and interviews with profe...

This book is about the politics of economic ideas, and the inevitable yet hidden politics of technocratic economic governance, explored through a focus on the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR)—the institution designed to oversee Britain’s fiscal policy. Drawing on an in-depth qualitative analysis of official documents and interviews with profe...

This book is about the politics of economic ideas, and the inevitable yet hidden politics of technocratic economic governance, explored through a focus on the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR)—the institution designed to oversee Britain’s fiscal policy. Drawing on an in-depth qualitative analysis of official documents and interviews with profe...

This book is about the politics of economic ideas, and the inevitable yet hidden politics of technocratic economic governance, explored through a focus on the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR)—the institution designed to oversee Britain’s fiscal policy. Drawing on an in-depth qualitative analysis of official documents and interviews with profe...

This book is about the politics of economic ideas, and the inevitable yet hidden politics of technocratic economic governance, explored through a focus on the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR)—the institution designed to oversee Britain’s fiscal policy. Drawing on an in-depth qualitative analysis of official documents and interviews with profe...

This book is about the politics of economic ideas, and the inevitable yet hidden politics of technocratic economic governance, explored through a focus on the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR)—the institution designed to oversee Britain’s fiscal policy. Drawing on an in-depth qualitative analysis of official documents and interviews with profe...

This book is about the politics of economic ideas, and the inevitable yet hidden politics of technocratic economic governance, explored through a focus on the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR)—the institution designed to oversee Britain’s fiscal policy. Drawing on an in-depth qualitative analysis of official documents and interviews with profe...

This book is about the politics of economic ideas, and the inevitable yet hidden politics of technocratic economic governance, explored through a focus on the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR)—the institution designed to oversee Britain’s fiscal policy. Drawing on an in-depth qualitative analysis of official documents and interviews with profe...

This book is about the politics of economic ideas, and the inevitable yet hidden politics of technocratic economic governance, explored through a focus on the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR)—the institution designed to oversee Britain’s fiscal policy. Drawing on an in-depth qualitative analysis of official documents and interviews with profe...

This book is about the politics of economic ideas, and the inevitable yet hidden politics of technocratic economic governance, explored through a focus on the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR)—the institution designed to oversee Britain’s fiscal policy. Drawing on an in-depth qualitative analysis of official documents and interviews with profe...

This article reflects on the working life, and disciplinary contribution to the study of French and comparative politics, of the late lamented Professor Robert Elgie.

This exploration of UK fiscal rules and the establishment of an independent UK fiscal watchdog focuses on the practical enactment of rules-based fiscal policy to analyse the politics of technocratic economic governance. Analysing UK macroeconomic policy rules and their operation unearths numerous dimensions of the politics of technocratic fiscal po...

This article assesses the usefulness of the growth models perspective for understanding contemporary British capitalism in the context of its ongoing ‘productivity puzzle’ and stagnating economic growth. The analysis of British capitalism supports our argument that growth models perspective analyses currently have limited capacity to understand the...

This is a book about how 21st Century capitalism really works. Modern economics strips away social, historical, and political context from analysis of ‘the economic’, but the economy is far too important to leave exclusively to the economists. Comparative Political Economy (CPE) is a much broader, richer intellectual undertaking which ‘re-embeds’ t...

A full understanding of the development and reproduction of IPE is only possible with an appreciation of its disciplinary politics. This institutionalises four aspects of academic inquiry: (a) what is considered admissible work in the field, (b) how work should be conducted and where it should be published (c) where the field's legitimate boundarie...

In a quest for political legitimacy and traction since the global financial crisis and the Arab Spring, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has become much more engaged in tackling inequality through its surveillance and other operations. This article analyses the depth and strength of this egalitarian commitment to reorient Fund actions. Notwith...

Tangled Governance: International Regime Complexity, the Troika, and the Euro Crisis. By C. Randall Henning. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. 312p. $37.95 cloth. - Volume 17 Issue 2 - Ben Clift

Methodological nationalism is hard-wired into social democratic thought and practice. The methodological nationalism which characterised the political economy of social democracy as a political movement in the twentieth century is a crucial source of the problems facing social democratic renewal today. This chapter proposes small steps towards soci...

This chapter demonstrates the worth of economic patriotism (EP), and its particular way of understanding the politics of market-making and the role of the state, for understanding the limits of control. EP reflects profound if not self-evident contradictions between international market integration and spatially limited political mandates. This is...

The book provides a path-breaking comprehensive analysis of how the IMF approach to fiscal policy has evolved since 2008, the Fund's role within the politics of austerity, and how it worked to shape advanced economy policy responses to the global financial crisis (GFC) and the Eurozone crisis. The book aligns with and advances cutting-edge ideation...

With the extraordinary rise of Emmanuel Macron and the near complete collapse of the Parti Socialiste (PS), the past year has seen arguably the most dramatic upheaval in the French party system since 1958. This article develops a political economy analysis of the Hollande quinquennat to better understand how we arrived here. It argues that Hollande...

The central political battle in Britain’s response to the global financial crisis (GFC) has been over the meanings of fiscal rectitude and economic credibility. This chapter analyses that battle by charting some of the key decisions taken by the UK Government, situating these in the context of ideas about management of public finances and Keynesian...

This article situates analysis of French macroeconomic policy developments under Hollande’s presidency within a wider context of macroeconomic policy autonomy under conditions of capital mobility, and the political economy of European economic governance. It focuses on the crucial Franco-German relationship because of its centrality to the evolutio...

This article analyses the political economy of state aid in the European Union (EU) using the concepts of economic patriotism and models of capitalism. State aid is analysed as a form of economic patriotism, which is conceived here as economic interventions which seek, by a number of means, to advance the perceived economic self-interest of particu...

This article analyses Hollande's presidential election campaign and victory of 2012, placing them in the historical, organisational and ideological context of French Socialism and the French party system. It argues that an effective campaign, an unpopular adversary and a French party system context unusually conducive to pooling the Left's electora...

The recent financial crisis has demonstrated that governments continuously seek to steer their economies rather than leaving them to free markets. Despite the ambitions of international economic cooperation, such interventionism is decidedly local. Some politicians even proudly evoke "economic patriotism" to justify their choices.This volume links...

This chapter analyzes French responses to the financial crisis, arguing that a 'post-dirigiste' interpretation predicated on an expansive notion of the state as actor in and enactor of markets best captures the qualitative shift in French state/market relations. Post-dirigisme incorporates how influential institutional and ideational legacies of th...

In the late twentieth century, the rise of neo-liberal economics appeared to some to signal the withdrawal of the nation state from key areas of economic life in the industrialized world. However, this was always an illusion. The recent financial crisis has demonstrated clearly that states remain the actor of last resort when the business system be...

We analyse how tensions between international market integration and spatially limited political mandates have led to the phenomenon of economic patriotism. As discrimination in favour of insiders, economic patriotism goes beyond economic nationalism and can include territorial allegiances at the supranational or the local level. We show how this p...

In the late twentieth century, the rise of neo-liberal economics appeared to some to signal the withdrawal of the nation state from key areas of economic life in the industrialized world. However, this was always an illusion. The recent financial crisis has demonstrated clearly that states remain the actor of last resort when the business system be...

Résumé L’argument principal de ce chapitre est que les politiques économiques sous Sarkozy se sont caractérisées par un « patriotisme économique néolibéral », mélange complexe de néolibéralisme et d’interventionnisme économique plus familier. Cette analyse insiste notamment sur l’absence de vision claire et cohérente, des conceptions différentes de...

This paper focuses on the EU Takeover Directive and the impact of its transposition into French law. Takeover regulation is employed as a test case in assessing the importance of the EU in inducing harmonisation within European varieties of capitalism. French outcomes diverge from EC aspirations for greater clarity and uniformity. Heightened uncert...

This article focuses on the EU Takeover Directive and its transposition into French law. French outcomes diverge from European Commission aspirations for greater clarity and uniformity. The clash of European capitalisms as well as heightened uncertainty and differentiation in takeover regulation exacerbate problems of asymmetric vulnerability of EU...

This chapter looks at the changing nature of’ social Europe’, analysing Europe’s social models and their relationship with the Lisbon agenda of ‘competitive Europe’ within the European political economy. The discursive framing of the interactions between domestic welfare politics and European economic governance is situated in relation to the ‘Euro...

This article analyses the changing political significance of UK balance of payments assessment in the post-war era, seeking to explain its disappearance as a policy issue today. We demonstrate the historically contingent nature of balance of payments performance assessment by comparing its shifting, conjunctural, constructions, rooted in underlying...

At its inception, a time of great political upheaval in France, it was uncertain whether the new regime would last five years, let alone fifty. The longevity of the regime is due in part to its flexibility and adaptability, which is a theme explored both below and in all of the contributions to this special issue. To set the scene, this will briefl...

For twenty years before the famous crisis of 1976 Britain was a regular borrower from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Through this lending role, the Fund in these years played a key part in determining the credibility of British policies. Borrowing from the Fund meant that British policy had to be seen as conforming to certain norms, but the...

This article analyses Ségolène Royal's rise during 2006 to become the first ever female mainstream French presidential candidate in the context of ongoing presidentialising tendencies within the French Fifth Republic. It considers the extent to which Royal's candidacy represented a turning point for the French Left, not only because of her gender,...

Colin Hay's combative response is a welcome engagement with our ideas. Let us first set out where the battle lines are drawn. The most important points in Hay's shot across our bows relate to accommodating the notion of complexity; defining Keynesianism; invoking Labour's past; the relationship between fiscal and monetary policy; and the evidential...

This article analyses the implications of the internationalisation of capital markets, and the influx of Anglo-Saxon institutional investors, for the French model of capitalism. Its central contention is that the global convergence thesis misrepresents contemporary evolutions because it pays insufficient attention to mechanisms of change within mod...

This article questions prevailing interpretations of New Labour's political economy and challenges the assumption within the comparative and international political economy literatures of the exhaustion of the Keynesian political economic paradigm. New Labour's doctrinal statements are analysed to establish to what extent these doctrinal positions...

This article traces the enduring influence of the dirigiste traditions on contemporary French macroeconomic policy-making, arguing that French policy both within and towards the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) is consistent with long-standing French dirigiste preferences and policy traditions. Specifically it explores how, within the SGP, French go...

In both Britain and France, party funding was traditionally characterized by a laissez faire approach and a conspicuous lack of regulation. In France, this was tantamount to a 'legislative vacuum'. In the last two decades, however, both countries have sought to fundamentally reform their political finance regulation regimes. This prompted, in Brita...

Shows that the politics of democratic societies is moving towards a presidentialized working mode, even in the absence of formal institutional changes. These developments can be explained by a combination of long-term structural changes in modern politics and societies’ contingent factors that fluctuate over time. While these contingent, short-term...

"This is a clearly structured, cogently argued and well written book. It provides both an excellent account of the development of the socialist party in the post-Mitterrand era and a stimulating investigation of the potential for a social democratic vision distinct from the current neo-liberal orthodoxy of the international political economy", Prof...

This article looks at how economic policy credibility is constructed in the contemporary period (1997-2003) and goes on to analyse the degree of enduring fiscal policy autonomy in two advanced industrial economies-Britain and France. Our selection of the British and French cases illustrates the different policy autonomy implications of choosing fix...

Recent studies of French capitalism have unearthed how the French model has evolved into a more market-oriented capitalism, with considerably less direct state intervention. In the wake of the end of 'protected' restructuring between (roughly) 1983 and 1996, when the state's preponderant role was able to direct the adjustment process to a considera...

In Britain, the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act has revolutionised the regulation of party finance after several half-hearted failures at attempted reform. In France, a series of high profile corruption scandals in the 1980s and 1990s provoked a bout of 'legislative incontinence' - resulting in over eight laws in seven years, which...

Differences in the way national economies are organized have been highlighted in academic and policy debates. Where are National Capitalisms Now? provides studies of key national economies, examining both enduring features of their economic institutions and how these have changed in response to international economic integration and divergent perfo...

This Article Explores The Nature Of Contemporary Social democracy, questioning, with like-minded scholars, John Gray's interpretation of the relationship between social democracy and globalization, which asserts that social democracy is a historically exhausted project. Garrett, for example, in rejecting such assertions, argues that social democrac...

From the 1920s to the 1950s R. H. Tawney was the most influential socialist thinker in Britain. He articulated an ethical socialism at odds with powerful statist and mechanistic traditions in British socialist thinking. Tawney's work is thus an important antecedent to third way thinking. Tawney's religiously-based critique of the morality of capita...

This article explores the political economy of the French Socialist Party (PS), beginning with the neo-liberal U-turn of 1983. It then charts the re-evaluation of the PS's political economic foundations after the 1993 defeat, the rejection of the neo-liberal 'pensée unique', and the rehabilitation of a broadly Keynesian frame of reference. The arti...

This article explores the enduring relevance (or otherwise) of class to social democracy through comparative analysis of the British Labour Party and the French Socialist Party (PS - Parti Socialiste ) at the beginning of the 21st century. It first considers the elite-level conception of class, and perceptions of its place within each party's ident...

Since Malmö, Tony Blair has castigated all those who do not share his proselytising zeal for the ‘third way’. Underpinning his view is a thinly veiled assumption that ‘there is no alternative.’ Another reading, advanced by Sassoon, is that—under the influence of globalisation—the whole of the European left is converging on overwhelmingly similar po...

This paper focuses on the phenomenon of economic patriotism understood not in the narrow or exclusively French sense (i.e. 'what Nicolas Sarkozy says and does'). Rather, French policy developments are analyzed as one (crude) iteration of a wider genus of political economic activity in contemporary Europe which seeks to advance the perceived economi...

East European enlargement has been firmly ensconced as a threat to the French economy and social model in the minds of a majority of French citizens. The timing of the launch of the Commission"s services draft directive and the reality of firms exploiting loopholes in existing legislation to bring in low-paid CEEC workers has reinforced the persist...

Despite pronouncements over the years of the end of social democracy, in 2007, the left in both France & Italy revisited the ideology, engaging in introspection & redefinition to update it. Since then, social democracy has come to be seen as practically synonymous with renewal & modernity. It tends to be identified with such institutional means as...