Varieties of Capitalism and Institutional Complementarities

Abstract

Political economists have always been interested in the differences in economic and political institutions that occur across countries. Some regard these differences as deviations from ‘best practice’ that will dissolve as nations catch up to a technological or organizational leader. Others see them as the distillation of more durable historical choices for a specific kind of society, since economic institutions condition levels of social protection, the distribution of income, and the availability of collective goods — features of the social solidarity of a nation. In each case, comparative political economy revolves around the conceptual frameworks used to understand institutional variation across nations.