Peter Hall

Harvard University | Harvard · Department of Government

On the premise that issues of fairness are important to voting behavior but often unrecognized, we explore how feelings of unfairness increase support for populist parties. We distinguish personal unfairness, the view that one’s own economic situation is unfair, from social unfairness, the view that the economic situation of others in society is un...

This Element documents long-term changes in the political attitudes of occupational groups, shifts in the salience of economic and cultural issues, and the movement of political parties in the electoral space from 1990 to 2018 in eight Western democracies. We evaluate prominent contentions about how electoral contestation has changed and why suppor...

This article investigates how macro-level structures condition the sources of socioeconomic inequalities in health. Drawing on multiple social science disciplines, the authors develop theoretically grounded propositions about how different types of welfare states, varieties of capitalism, and social structures give rise to cross-national variations...

Although it has a durable institutional shape, the operation of capitalism takes different forms across space and time with varying distributive effects. This article contributes to a growing literature considering the successive forms taken by capitalism in the developed democracies since World War II. It develops a distinctive conception of these...

This article argues that the relationship between capitalism and democracy is not immutable but subject to changes over time best understood as movements across distinctive growth and representation regimes. Growth regimes are the institutionalized practices central to how a country secures economic prosperity based on complementary sets of firm st...

This chapter charts the shape and movement of the growth strategies of the developed democracies since 1945 across three periods: an era of modernization, one of liberalization, and an era of knowledge-based growth, with an emphasis on the relationship between developments in the political economy and changes in the character of electoral politics....

We argue that support for parties of the radical right and left can usefully be understood as a problem of social integration—an approach that brings together economic and cultural explanations for populism. With comparative survey data, we assess whether support for parties of the radical right and left is associated with feelings of social margin...

This article explores the role played by electoral politics in the evolution of postwar growth regimes, understood as the economic and social policies used by governments of the developed democracies to pursue economic growth. It charts changes in growth regimes beginning with an era of modernization stretching from 1950 to 1975, through an era of...

This essay explores the evolution of postwar growth regimes, understood as the economic and social policies used by governments to pursue economic growth in the developed democracies. It charts movement in growth regimes from an era of modernization stretching from 1950 to 1975, through an era of liberalization running from 1980 to the late 1990s,...

This paper explores the factors that have recently increased support for candidates and causes of the populist right across the developed democracies, especially among a core group of working-class men. In the context of debates about whether the key causal factors are economic or cultural, we contend that an effective analysis must rest on underst...

This article examines the implications of the euro crisis for theories of political economy associated with ‘varieties of capitalism’, considering how those theories help explain the origins of the crisis and how developments during it mandate revisions in such theories. Efforts to understand the crisis have extended these theories in four directio...

Scholarship on varieties of capitalism (VofC) explores the ways in which the institutions structuring the political economy affect patterns of economic performance or policy making and the distribution of well-being. Contesting the claim that there is one best route to superior economic performance, a number of schemas have been proposed to explain...

Social Policy-Making for the Long Term - Volume 48 Issue 2 - Peter A. Hall

This article examines the role played by varieties of capitalism in the euro crisis, considering the origins of the crisis, its progression, and the response to it. Deficiencies in the institutional arrangements governing the single currency are linked to economic doctrines of the 1990s. The roots of the crisis are linked to institutional asymmetri...

The objective of this study is to outline a capabilities approach to the social determinants of population health and to compare its explanatory power and implications for public policy-making with psychosocial approaches. A model linking the structures of economic and social relations to health outcomes is developed and logistic methods used to co...

Throughout a distinguished academic career, Manfred Schmidt (1996, 1999, 2002c, 2006) has always been concerned with the performance of democracies, which he sees as an eminently political matter, deeply conditioned by the quality of partisan political competition, but also dependent on the institutional structures superintending governance. His mo...

Building on a Lakatosian approach that sees Social Science as an endeavour that confronts rival theories with systematic empirical observations, this article responds to probing questions that have been raised about the appropriate ways in which to conduct systematic process analysis and comparative enquiry. It explores varieties of process tracing...

This book is an effort to assess developments in a neoliberal era spanning the past three decades of global history. Although social science examines many phenomena, it looks only rarely at what Pierson (2003) calls “big, slow-moving processes.” We are often not aware of the sands shifting beneath our feet as events change the character of the time...

This is a book about how processes of political representation work, whom they represent, and how they develop over time. We think of these as processes in which interests are formed, given a voice within organizations and polities, and influence the decisions of governments. As such, these processes are at the heart of how democracies are organize...

How has the process of political representation changed in the era of globalization? The representation of interests is at the heart of democracy, but how is it that some interests secure a strong voice, while others do not? While each person has multiple interests linked to different dimensions of his or her identity, much of the existing academic...

This article addresses puzzles raised by the Euro crisis: why was EMU established with limited institutional capacities, where do the roots of the crisis lie, how can the response to the crisis be explained, and what are its implications for European integration? It explores how prevailing economic doctrines conditioned the institutional shape of t...

Political science can gain from incorporating richer conceptions of social relations into its analyses. In place of atomistic entities endowed with assets but few social relationships, social actors should be seen as relational entities embedded in social and cultural structures that connect them to others in multifaceted ways. Understanding those...

Analyses in comparative political economy have the potential to contribute to understanding health inequalities within and between societies. This article uses a varieties of capitalism approach that groups high-income countries into coordinated market economies (CME) and liberal market economies (LME) with different labor market institutions and d...

Some of the liveliest debates about methodology in the social sciences center on comparative research. This essay concentrates on comparative politics, a field often defined by reference to the use of a particular “comparative method,” but it also bears on sociology, where there is active controversy about methodological issues. I use the term “met...

AlberJens and GilbertNeil eds., United in Diversity? Comparing Social Models in Europe and America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 450 Hardcover ISBN 978-0-19-537663-0 - Volume 30 Issue 3 - Peter A. Hall

The relationship between health and social class is firmly established but theoretical understanding of its determinants is not well advanced. Existing approaches have limitations and their propositions are rarely tested against each other. We outline a new approach to the problem that links class-based inequalities in health to imbalances between...

This paper argues for the value of seeing politics as a process that is structured across space and time. A brief review of recent debates about redistribution illustrates the importance of structural features of politics but the limits of Schumpeterian models based on cross-sectional time series estimations that ascribe major outcomes to a small n...

Some of the most fruitful insights generated by social science in recent decades flow from explorations of how institutions, understood as sets of regularized practices with a rule-like quality, structure the behavior of political and economic actors. It is not surprising that attention has now turned to the second-order problem of explaining when...

Re-FormingCapitalism - StreeckWolfgang, Re-Forming the Capitalism: Institutional Change in the German Political Economy (Oxford University Press, 2009). - Volume 50 Issue 3 - Peter A. Hall

Governments are often urged to take steps to improve the health of their citizens. But there is controversy about how best to achieve that goal. Popular opinion calls for more investment in medical care and the promotion of behaviors associated with good health. However, across the developed countries on which we focus here, variations in the healt...

Conflict scholars have devoted considerable attention to the natural resource curse, and specifically to connections between natural resources, state weakness, and civil war. Many have posited a state weakness mechanism– that significant oil production causes state weakness, and state weakness consequently increases the likelihood of civil war onse...

Three decades marked by many market-oriented initiatives often labeled as neo-liberal are widely said to have increased income inequality and influenced people’s thinking about the economy and their role in it. Using data from the World Values Survey, this paper explores how popular attitudes to the economy have changed over this period and asks wh...

Contemporary approaches to varieties to capitalism are often criticized for neglecting issues of institutional change. This paper develops an approach to institutional change more extended than the one provided in Hall and Soskice (in Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2...

Government

Why are some types of societies more successful than others at promoting individual and collective well-being? Focusing on population health as an indicator of social success, this book opens up new perspectives on the ways in which social relations condition health and the public policies that address it. Based on four years of dialogue among scho...

Why is there so much alleged electoral fraud in new democracies? Most scholarship focuses on the proximate cause of electoral competition. This article proposes a different answer by constructing and analyzing an original dataset drawn from the German parliament's own voluminous record of election disputes for every parliamentary election in the li...

Challenging the contention that statistical methods applied to large numbers of cases invariably provide better grounds for causal inference, this article explores the value of a method of systematic process analysis that can be applied in a small number of cases. It distinguishes among three modes of explanation – historically specific, multivaria...

Martin Höpner's paper was written to structure discussions at a workshop of the ‘Complementarity Project’, which was held in Paris, 26–27 September 2003. The project was organized by Bruno Amable and Robert Boyer (CEPREMAP, Paris), Colin Crouch (EUI, Florence), Martin Höpner and Wolfgang Streeck (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies...

This book is animated by a problem and a puzzle. The problem is how to understand the dramatic changes that have transformed France over the past 25 years. Accounts of contemporary France often emphasize continuities rooted in the historical features of Jacobinism, Gaullism, dirigisme or the social relations of la société bloquée (cf. Crozier 1964;...

This paper reviews the history of post-war American social science, emphasizing political science, with a view to identifing some of the dilemmas facing it today. The waning of a modernization problematic that facilitated intensive dialogue between history, sociology, political science and economics has seen a bifurcation in which history has drawn...

This chapter challenges the conventional view that international economic developments are eroding distinctive varieties of capitalism. On the premise that we can understand institutional change only if we look over a longer historical perspective, it examines the character of economic challenges and the institutional responses to them in Britain,...

La diversité des trois regards critiques offerts sur notre ouvrage reflète la diversité disciplinaire que nous avons voulue à l’origine de ce projet, visant à mobiliser les sciences sociales dans leur diversité (économie politique, histoire, sociologie, science politique…) pour comprendre la diversité des mutations économiques, sociales et politiqu...

Voici un tableau complet des mutations intervenues en France depuis vingt-cinq ans. Loin d'accréditer la thèse d'un pays incapable de se réformer il révèle que la France a connu de profondes transformations économiques. sociales et politiques au cours des décennies récentes Où en est-on du dirigisme économique ? Du modelé social républicain ? De l'...

Challenging the contention that statistical methods applied to large numbers of cases invariably provide better grounds for causal inference, this article explores the value of a method of systematic process analysis that can be applied in a small number of cases. It distinguishes among three modes of explanation – historically specific, multivaria...

Martin Höpner (hoepner@mpifg.de), Ph.D., is a political scientists and researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany. His work focuses on comparative political economy. In particular, he has published on organized capitalism, industrial relations and corporate governance. Among his recent publications are "Eu...

How do European states adjust to international markets? Why do French governments of both left and right face a crisis of public confidence? In this book, leading experts on France delineate the dramatic changes that have taken place in its polity, economy and society since the 1980s and develop an analysis of social change relevant to all democrac...

Este artículo presenta un nuevo marco de análisis para dar cuenta de qué modo las variaciones en las instituciones nacionales condicionan y estructuran la política económica y el desempeño de los países. Mediante la aplicación de la nueva economía de la organización al estudio de la macroeconomía, el trabajo sostiene que las competencias básicas de...

Rational partisan theory's exclusive focus on electoral uncertainty ignores the importance of policy uncertainty for the economy. I develop a theory of policy risk to account for this uncertainty. Using an innovative measure of electoral probabilities based on Iowa Electronic Markets futures data for the U.S. from 1988-2000, I test both theories. A...

"Martin Höpner's paper was written to structure discussions at a workshop of the 'Complementarity Project', which was held in Paris, 26-27 September 2003. The project was organized by Bruno Amable and Robert Boyer, Colin Crouch, Martin Höpner and Wolfgang Streeck. The subject of the workshop was the complementarity, real or imagined, of financial m...

Der Beitrag geht der Frage nach, wie national unterschiedliche politökonomische Institutionen die Leistungskraft entwickelter Marktwirtschaften beeinflussen und ob institutionelle Komplementaritäten in der Makroökonomie existieren. Der Ansatz der „Spielarten des Kapitalismus“ behauptet, dass es diese Komplementaritäten gibt und sich die Länder ents...

Using aggregate analysis, this paper examines the core contentions of the "varieties of capitalism" perspective on comparative capitalism. We construct a coordination index to assess whether the institutional features of liberal and coordinated market economies conform to the predictions of the theory. We test the contention that institutional comp...

Central bankers' careers are shown to influence inflation outcomes. I present two theories in which careers explain central bank behavior, develop them in a game theoretic model, and test them using a comprehensive new data set of central bankers' career backgrounds which spans twenty rich democ-racies and half a century. Career experiences vary co...

Although democracy is often seen as an achievement secured once and for all at one point in time, when the suffrage was extended to the bulk of the population, for instance, in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century in western Europe, in fact, it is the product of an evolving process in which the institutions and ideals of representative go...

Plans for the European Monetary Union (EMU) are based on the conventional postulate that increasing the independence of the central bank can reduce inflation without any real economic effects. However, the theoretical and empirical bases for this claim rest on models of the economy that make unrealistic information assumptions and omit institutiona...

L'approche en termes de « variétés de capitalisme » pose que pour coordonner leurs acti-vités, les entreprises peuvent soit compter principalement sur les marchés, soit s'appuyer sur des modes de coordination hors marché. Ces différences découlent du type et du niveau de soutien institutionnel dispo-nible pour la coordination de marché ou pour la c...

this paper is to address these problems, by devising indicators for the central concepts of the varieties of capitalism approach and subjecting its core contentions to aggregate empirical tests. We begin by developing indices to measure the balance between market-oriented and strategic coordination in the political economy. We then assess the core...

Applying the new economics of organization and relational theories of the firm to the problem of understanding cross‐national variation in the political economy, this volume elaborates a new understanding of the institutional differences that characterize the ‘varieties of capitalism’ found among the developed economies. Building on a distinction b...

Applying the new economics of organization and relational theories of the firm to the problem of understanding cross‐national variation in the political economy, this volume elaborates a new understanding of the institutional differences that characterize the ‘varieties of capitalism’ found among the developed economies. Building on a distinction b...

The movement for European integration has yielded a European Union of fifteen states with a unified monetary system that will eventually embrace over 370 million people. If current trends continue, an average of one in ten of these people will be unemployed. Not surprisingly, the European public ranks joblessness among its primary political concern...

The relationship between the European Union and its member states is complex and evolving. This book explores not only the nature of this relationship, but also the broader implications of European integration for the ways in which the subject of European politics is studied.

i 1 Introduction 1 2 Generalized Additive Models 2 2.1 Interpreting GAMs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2.2 Contrasting other non-parametric approaches . . . . . . . . 4 3 Scatterplot Smoothing 6 3.1 Smoothing by local regression (loess) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 3.2 Cubic smoothing splines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....

Recent findings show an apparent erosion in the United States over the post-war years of ‘social capital’ understood as the propensity of individuals to associate together on a regular basis, to trust one another, and to engage in community affairs. This article examines the British case for similar trends, finding no equivalent erosion. It propos...

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...

This article reviews the recent literature on the political economy of the industrialized nations with a view to asking which lines of enquiry offer the most promising ways of understanding the political economies of Europe in an era of international interdependence. It proposes a model of the political economy with two layers, one that identifies...

On peut mieux apprehender le « neo-institutionnalisme » en science politique comme le developpement de trois ecoles de pensee distinctes : institutionnalisme historique, institutionnalisme des choix rationnels, et institutionnalisme sociologique. Les auteurs resument les intuitions centrales de chaque ecole, en portant une attention particuliere a...

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1994 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association and at a Conference on ‘What is Institutionalism Now?’ at the University of Maryland, October 1994. We would like to acknowledge the hospitality and stimulation that W. Richard Scott, the Stanford Center for Organizations Research...

In no sphere of French policy have recent developments been more significant than in the area of economic policy. Their thrust has been to reduce the role of the state in the economy and turn the allocation of resources more directly over to market mechanisms. In many respects, this has been a general European trend. After 30 years distinguished by...

Between the state and society in every industrialised nation stands a network of interest organisations, established to express the views of various social or economic groups to the governing authorities. Along with political parties, this network of organised interests is one of the principal features of the political system whereby the interests...

This article examines the model of social learning often believed to confirm the autonomy of the state from social pressures, tests it against recent cases of change in British economic policies, and offers a fuller analysis of the role of ideas in policymaking, based on the concept of policy paradigms. A conventional model of social learning is fo...

GrantWyn, Government and Industry: A Comparative Analysis of the US, Canada and the UK. Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1989, pp. vii and 303. ISBN 1 85278 007 X. - Volume 10 Issue 4 - Peter A. Hall