Fran & ccedil;ois Godard's Germany, France, and Postwar Democratic Capitalism: Expert Rule is a lively history of how Germany and France reconstructed their economies after the Second World War which highlights the roles played by states in that process and how they used new narratives to lead social actors to reconceptualize their interests. In rejecting the notion of a 'postwar settlement,' however, Godard neglects how important the structure of the political economy and organized interests are to what states can do, and overstates the extent to which technocrats were responsible for economic success. That carries implications for how we might view the value of technocracy today.

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 unfair. Based on findings in psychology, we argue that uncertainties associated with the transition to a globalized knowledge economy heighten people's feelings of personal unfairness and find empirical support for that contention. We develop arguments about why feelings of personal unfairness should increase support for the populist right and feelings about social unfairness should increase support for the populist left and find empirical support for them. Our results contribute to explanations for why people vote for the populist right rather than the left and underline the roles that uncertainty and issues of fairness play in electoral politics.

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 forms as "growth regimes" that are mutually constituted by the core practices of firms and reinforcing public policies specific to each historical era. The movement of firm practices and government policies is then examined with a view to identifying the growth regimes of three postwar eras of modernization, liberalization, and knowledge-based growth.

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 support for mainstream parties has declined while support for challenger parties has increased. We contribute a new analysis of how the viability of the types of electoral coalitions assembled by center-left, center-right, radical-right, and Green parties changes over these decades. We find that their viability is affected by changes over time in citizens' attitudes to economic and cultural issues and shifts in the relative salience of those issues. We examine the contribution these developments make to declining support for mainstream center-left and center-right coalitions and increasing support for coalitions underpinning radical-right and Green parties.

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 in the sources of health inequalities. They consider how these macro-level structures affect the distribution of five key resources important to health, estimate the relative contribution that each resource makes to health inequalities, and compare those contributions in 21 developed democracies. Moving beyond a current literature focused on welfare states, the authors show how different types of political economies and social structures also condition the health gradient. This research carries implications for policy and suggests agendas for further investigation into the relationship between macro-level structures and inequalities in health.

Longitudinal studies conducted within the social economy have the potential to provide useful insights by tracing participant experiences and illuminating long-term outcomes of program interventions. However, longitudinal studies are challenging, not only due to retention of participants, but also when a longitudinal study covers a broad geographic area. The authors collaborated in a five-year pan-Canadian longitudinal study following youth participants in work-integration social enterprise (WISE) training programs. This article traces the experiences of study teams in Ontario and Greater Vancouver, providing accounts of the approaches and challenges encountered when working in geographically and socio-economically diverse locales over time with youth participants facing social marginalization. This article highlights three aspects of data collection—recruitment, retention, and research methods and logistics—offering insights into how each team devised its own strategies to fit with local circumstances while maintaining consistency across research sites.

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 strategies and government policies. Representation regimes reflect conditions in the arenas of electoral and producer group politics that confer influence on specific segments of the population. The emphasis is on how economic experiences and changes in the structure of electoral cleavages alter the terms of political contestation, thereby giving voice to specific sets of interests and altering the balance of influence between capitalism and democracy. The analysis examines how the growth and representation regimes of the developed democracies have changed through three post-war eras to yield distinctive distributive outcomes in each era.

Technological applications have caused a revolution in the way individual transportation rides are offered and taken in cities all over the world. The adoption and regulation of ride-hailing has been the subject of heated discussion involving elected officials, bureaucrats, industry proponents, the traditional taxicab industry, and civil society. To implement ride-hailing, proponents and platform operators confront an intricate web of decision-making processes and institutional politics. In this way, existing normative processes shape the emergent regulation of such transportation network companies. This article analyzes the case of Vancouver, Canada, one of the largest cities in North America where ride-hailing companies belatedly secured authorization to operate from the provincial government in 2019. Focusing on the policy debate since 2012, the research identifies the interactions and processes of interest representation among various actors regarding this new transportation technology. The analysis shows how a variety of political, economic and regulatory strategies contributed to the delayed adoption.

We report findings from an experimental study of the impacts of employer-paid transit subsidies on workers at downtown hotels in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Partnering with the union and management of seven hotels, the regional transit agency and city government, we collected representative surveys of commuting behavior in three waves, each six months apart, in 2018 and 2019. Four of the hotels had offered a 15% transit subsidy prior to the study. We grouped six of the hotels in three similarly located pairs with the same initial subsidy condition. After the first survey wave, we provided an experimental subsidy at four hotels: 25% at one hotel in each of three pairs, and 15% at the seventh hotel. After the second survey we further increased the subsidy to 50% at two hotels. The larger the transit subsidy offered, the more employees become transit riders and the more transit-only commuting increased. Overall, a modest increase in transit-only commuting was accompanied by a reduction in auto-only and auto-and-transit commuting. It appears that transit subsidy acceptance and effectiveness can be dampened by factors such as the availability of cheap parking, or greater distance between the workplace and rapid transit, leading to variability in outcomes.

The coronavirus crisis has inflamed cleavages in democratic societies which will be difficult to heal.

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. It argues that economic policy-making always entails assembling coalitions for policy in both the arenas of electoral politics and of producer group politics. Accordingly, economic policy responds, not only to secular economic developments, but also to shifting political conditions and notably to changes in the cleavage structures underpinning electoral politics, which are themselves influenced by preceding economic developments. Growth strategies are conditioned by how an evolving “economic gestalt” portrays the problems of the economy and by processes of coalition formation in the electoral arena. The chapter devotes special attention to the growth strategies of the UK, France, Germany, and Sweden.

Powerful voices have been raised in favour of something stronger. London, it is argued, is weakened internationally by being the only major city in the world without a defined urban authority or a recognizable political leader. The aim had to be to restructure London, like Paris, around strong activity points at major public transport interchanges. The Government responded with the London Forum, to act as a kind of ginger-group lobbying organization; and the private sector responded with London First, as a promotional agency. In 1993, for the first time in the history of regional assistance in Britain, substantial areas of London found themselves included in the redrawn map of the assisted areas. Extending regional aid to parts of London, as the Government did in 1993, can encourage employers to locate there. Major new public transport links, such as the Jubilee Line extension through Docklands, and maybe CrossRail if it proves affordable, could improve access to those same areas.

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 marginalization. We find that people who feel more socially marginal-because they lack strong attachment to the normative order, social engagement, or a sense of social respect-are more likely to be alienated from mainstream politics and to support radical parties. We also find an association between indicators for recent economic and cultural developments often said to affect social status and feelings of social marginalization, especially among people with low incomes or educational attainment. We conclude that problems of social integration and subjective social status deserve more attention from scholars of comparative political behavior.

We describe the rise of "opportunity markets" that allow well-off parents to buy opportunity for their children. Although parents cannot directly buy a middle-class outcome for their children, they can buy opportunity indirectly through advantaged access to the schools, neighborhoods, and information that create merit and raise the probability of a middle-class outcome. The rise of opportunity markets happened so gradually that the country has seemingly forgotten that opportunity was not always sold on the market. If the United States were to recommit to equalizing opportunities, this could be pursued by dismantling opportunity markets, by providing low-income parents with the means to participate in them, or by allocating educational opportunities via separate competitions among parents of similar means. The latter approach, which we focus upon here, would not require mobilizing support for a massive redistributive project.

This paper examines the quality of electoral representation in the western democracies. By considering movements in the positions of citizens and political parties over both short and long terms along two dimensions of the electoral space, we compare the contentions of studies which find that parties are responsive to voters when examined along a single dimension over electoral cycles with the arguments of a political economy literature suggesting that mainstream parties are no longer responsive to voters. We find that mainstream parties were largely unresponsive to citizens on economic issues over the two decades between 1990 and 2010. As others predict, niche parties became more extreme on their core issues, but on secondary dimensions they often became more moderate. The results reveal representation gaps and that citizens suffering the most from them are more likely to lack confidence in the legislature and less likely to vote.

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 liberalization running from 1980 to 2000, to a subsequent era of knowledge-based growth. Its overarching claim is that the inclination and capacities of democratic governments to pursue specific growth regimes depend not only on economic circumstances but also on evolving electoral conditions, marked especially by changes in the cleavages that condition partisan electoral strategies. This electoral dynamic affects the balance of influence over policy between actors in the electoral and producer-group arenas and carries implications for the social compromises that democracies can construct. The article concludes by exploring the implications of contemporary electoral politics for the development of growth regimes appropriate to a knowledge economy.

Urban waterfront research has concentrated primarily on the redevelopment of the core areas of major port cities; yet just as cargo handling activities have extended from their traditional core urban port locations into the metropolitan hinterland, urban waterfront redevelopments have spread into smaller and suburban communities. Both processes have occurred without much scholarly attention. In this paper, we trace the implications of waterfront redevelopment processes in smaller suburban communities beyond the urban core. We show how suburban waterfront developments tend to ignore local cultural histories and communities while threatening the values of diversity that might be embraced in all public spaces, regardless of location. To accomplish this, we provide a case study of waterfront redevelopment and public space formation in the town of Squamish, British Columbia, in comparison to other suburban waterfront redevelopments around the metropolis of Vancouver. Typically, these redevelopments are in communities that used to host signifi cant industrial operations and are now trying to “reinvent” themselves. We identify the limited publics celebrated by, and the constrained forms of publicness created through, contemporary suburban waterfront planning practices. We also pay specifi c attention to the changing planning discourses that strongly infl uence the design and marketing of contemporary suburban waterfront communities.