How do capitalist economies change over time? And what political consequences follow?
In his new book, Governing Growth, which he will discuss at this event, Peter Hall traces the interactions between politics and economics in Western democracies over the past eighty years, identifying a series of profound shifts in the political economies of Europe and the United States. Hall develops the concept of successive growth regimes, each the result of public policies interacting with the strategies of private firms. Alongside each growth regime, he argues, there is a distinctive representation regime, which determines whose voices have the most influence over public policy. Showing how these two regimes interact, he develops a new account of the processes through which political economies change over time. Hall outlines three postwar growth regimes: an era of modernization, from 1945 to about 1975; an era of liberalisation, from 1980 to the late 1990s; and an era of knowledge-based growth, beginning at the turn of the century. His sweeping analysis sheds new light not only on the relationship between capitalism and democracy, but also on the roots of our contemporary political dilemmas
Meet our speakers and chair:
is Krupp Foundation Professor of European Studies in the Department of Government at Harvard and a resident faculty member of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies.
is the Sutherland Chair in European Institutions and Head of the Department of Government at LSE.
is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Government, and was School Professor of Political Science and Economics from 2012-2022 at LSE. He taught macroeconomics at Oxford and subsequently Research Professor of Comparative Political Economy at Oxford and senior research fellow at Nuffield College, and Research Professor of Political Science at Duke.
is author and editor of several books on trade policy and monetary policy. Her 2022 book, Deliberative Accountability in Parliamentary Committees, asks why we see declining trust in British government and political institutions while at the same time we have seen an explosion in government accountability.