Documents Max-Planck-Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung, Köln 115 results

"Capitalism is an economic and social order oriented toward the future. In this paper, I describe the unfolding of the temporal order of capitalism and relate it to the restless dynamism of capitalism we have observed since the Industrial Revolution. Since the future is open, actors are confronted with the uncertainty of the outcomes of their decisions. What can expectations be under conditions of uncertainty? To answer this question, I introduce the notion of fictional expectations which can be used to describe decisions made under conditions of an open and uncertain future. In the paper's penultimate section, I apply the concept of fictional expectations to the analysis of four crucial processes of capitalism: money and credit, investments, innovation, and consumption. The main thrust of the paper is that in order to understand economic action in capitalism, actors' perceptions of the future need to take center stage. Not only "history matters," but also the "future matters."

"Liberalisierungspolitik bezeichnet die politisch herbeigeführte und politisch legitimierte Delegation von Allokations- und Distributionsentscheidungen an Märkte und zielt auf Durchsetzung der Prinzipien der Eigenverantwortung, der dezentralen Entscheidungsfindung und der Konkurrenz. Viele politökonomische Klassiker vertraten die Ansicht, dem Kapitalismus sei ein anhaltender Trend der Marktbeseitigung eigen, was den Eintritt in eine längere, mehrere Politikbereiche umfassende Phase politischer Marktschaffung unwahrscheinlich, wenn nicht gar unmöglich erscheinen ließ. Anhand von ländervergleichenden, zeitvarianten Indikatoren zu fünf Wirtschafts- und sozialpolitischen Sphären weisen wir in diesem Papier nach, dass die entwickelten Industriestaaten spätestens in den Achtzigerjahren in eine konvergente liberalisierungspolitische Phase eintraten, in der sie nicht nur parallele Liberalisierungspolitik betrieben, sondern sich hinsichtlich ihrer öffentlichen Interventionsniveaus auch spürbar ähnlicher wurden. Das zeigen wir anhand von Daten zu 21 OECD-Ländern im Zeitraum zwischen 1980 und 2005. Im Ergebnis unterscheiden wir zwei Dimensionen der Liberalisierungspolitik: regulatorische Liberalisierung und distributive Liberalisierung. Die empirischen Betrachtungen münden in eine Diskussion der empirischen, theoretischen und methodischen Implikationen von Konvergenz. "

"The article analyzes the integration of Central and Eastern European (CEE) trade unions in European policy-making. With reference to transnational cooperation in two fields of European-level decision making (issues concerning freedom of services and a European minimum wage), it investigates the extent to which trade unions from the CEE countries are participating in the development of policy positions among European-level trade union organizations. On this basis, the article highlights three things: (1) the instrumental meaning of "Social Europe," (2) the necessity of a mid-way position between optimistic and pessimistic viewpoints on East–West trade union cooperation, and (3) the meaning of social skill among European-level trade union actors."

"In the course of European integration, national trade unions in Europe founded the umbrella organization of the European Trade Union Confederation in order to establish common political positions. Drawing on the case of supranational politics of services regulation, this study shows how cleavages within the EU's multi-level system of labor regulation make the development of such positions a difficult task. Whereas most research on cleavages at the supranational level focuses either on party groups or national origin, findings indicate a vertical line of conflict within the multi-level system of European trade unionism."

"In this paper, we take up the burgeoning debate about the underrepresentation of the working class in politics. In the literature section we discuss theories of group representation and look at recent empirical studies of responsiveness that have begun to disaggregate public opinion by sociodemographic categories. Empirically, we analyze a dataset of more than 700 survey items collected in Germany between 1980 and 2012. The analysis shows that respondents within one social class are more similar to each other than to members of other classes and that class-based differences outweigh those of education, region, or gender. While opinion differences are not always large, they can reach 50 percentage points. There are frequently gaps of between 20 or 30 percentage points in support for or opposition to policy changes. Since workers' opinions tend to differ from the opinions of those groups who are well represented in parliament, their numerical underrepresentation might bias decisions against them, as recent studies suggest."