Saturday, March 15, 2014
Blue Room (Omni Shoreham)
Harold Lasswell defined politics as who gets what, when, and how. In studying the role of business in capitalism, historical institutional (HI) scholarship has made substantial strides in understanding the “what” and, especially, the “when” of politics; but it has been less attentive to the “how.” In other words, work in the HI tradition has shed substantial light on the determinants of, and cross-national variation in, employer preferences over policy and institutions (the “what”). And it has underscored the role of temporal processes in politics, and the ways in which the strength of winning coalitions at times of institutional change gets built in to sticky institutions, with feedbacks on the future preferences of employers and their political opponents (the “when”). In shedding light on the diversity of employer preferences in advanced capitalism, and the unusual alliances it creates, however, it cast a shadow over questions of “how” asked by an earlier generation of scholars of political economy: across different varieties of capitalism, how do business leaders get what they want from democratic politics when they are such a small portion of the electorate?
