Documents Van der Zwan, Natasha 3 results

"Since the early 2000s, scholars from a variety of disciplines have used the concept of financialization to describe a host of structural changes in the advanced political economies. Studies of financialization interrogate how an increasingly autonomous realm of global finance has altered the underlying logics of the industrial economy and the inner workings of democratic society. This paper evaluates the insights of more than a decade of scholarship on financialization. Three approaches will be discussed: the emergence of a new regime of accumulation, the ascendency of the shareholder value orientation and the financialization of everyday life. It is argued that a deeper understanding of financialization will lead to a better understanding of organized interests, the politics of the welfare state, and processes of institutional change."

"In comparative political economy, the patience of capital investment has often been explained with the political activity of stakeholders. Such scholarship attributes investment preferences to either set assumptions about what various actors are likely to want from their pension systems or to macro-level institutional factors. Comparing the preferences of business and labor actors in the occupational pension systems in Finland, the Netherlands, and the USA, we argue that preferences are better explained more dynamically and emerge from meso-level institutional forces. We find that financing needs and capacities, governance capacities and financial regulations explain changes in labor and business preferences with regard to fund investment. In each of the cases, a combination of these three institutional factors explains a preference shift toward more varied and more impatient investing."

"The discussion on ‘New Approaches to Political Economy (PE)' gives us a state-of-the-art overview of the main theoretical and conceptual developments within the concept of political economy. Thereby, it invites us to broaden our knowledge regarding manifold novel approaches, which make use of more complex methods to study the less stable, less predictable, but faster changing realities of smaller or bigger geographical regions. In this discussion forum, Amable takes a closer look on the nature of ‘conflict' as well as the relationship between conflict and institutional change or stability. After stressing the relevance of comparative capitalism in general, Regan also zooms in on the political conflicts in comparative political economy from three different perspectives (electoral politics, organized interest groups and business-state elites), where he finds new avenues, tensions and research agendas are opening up. From a different perspective, Avdagic reviews the broad developments in the field of political economy with respect to the supply and demand side of redistributive policy. Thereafter, Baccaro and Pontusson sketch an alternative ‘growth model perspective', which puts demand and distribution at the center of the analysis. Finally, Van der Zwan analyses the usefulness of financialization studies for the study of (comparative) political economy."