Bob Hancké

The sudden, dramatic rise in inflation after the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine interrupted three low-inflation decades and reignited the question of the causes of and responses to inflation. This book addresses that question by looking back at the emergence of the low-inflation 'monetarist' macroeconomic regime in the advanced capitalist economies during the 1980s. While dominant perspectives emphasise new ideas or structural power, this book puts the underlying politics at the centre of the analysis. It combines two processes in that analysis. First, the slow but steady improvement of life chances across the population since the 1950s, which shifted the relative concerns about inflation and unemployment across the population. Second, the strategic responses of political parties, and particularly social-democratic parties, to inflationary shocks in the face of a changing electorate. Case studies of leading European economies and the US underpin the argument.

This book unpacks what political economy is and does through an investigation of its main questions and approaches. Bob Hancké, Toon Van Overbeke and Dustin Voss offer a historical and thematic review of the evolution of political-economic thought, centred on the relation between capitalism and democracy. Chapters discuss how interests, ideas and institutions are the methodological and conceptual building blocks of political economy. The authors use these concepts to understand how markets work and why they fail, the problems facing the welfare state, the political economy of voting and democracy, and the problems of cooperation in a world of interdependent democracies. Covering the main analytical approaches that political economists have developed to tackle the complexities of this social world, the book expands on some of the most important questions confronting the field. Understanding Political Economy is an invaluable resource for academics and students of political science, economics, and international relations. Its insights on capitalism, democracy and inequality are vital for policymakers in the field.

This book examines the crisis of EMU through the lenses of comparative political economy. It retraces the development of wage-setting systems in the core and peripheral EMU member states, and how these contributed to the increasing divergence between creditor and debtor states in the late 2000s. Starting with the construction of the Deutschmark bloc, through the Maastricht process of the 1990s, and into the first decade of EMU, this book analyzes how labour unions and wage determination systems adjusted in response to monetary integration and, in turn, influenced the shape that monetary union would eventually take. Before the introduction of the Euro, labour unions were disciplined by central banks and governments, after social conflict in the north of the continent and with the use of social pacts in the others. Since controlling inflation had become the main goal of macro-economic policy, national central banks acted as a backstop to keep militant unions and profligate governments under control. Public sector wages thus were subordinated to manufacturing wages, a set-up policed by export sector unions, aided by the central bank. With the introduction of the single currency, the European Central Bank replaced the national central banks and, as a result, their capacity to control labour unions disappeared. The strong links between wages in the public sector unions and wages in the manufacturing export sector weakened dramatically in many countries, wage inflation re-emerged, and the stage was set for the current account divergences at the basis of the crisis of EMU.

This book offers advice to doctoral researchers and graduate and advanced undergraduate students on how to embark on their research. Based on a decade of teaching early-stage researchers in the social sciences at the LSE and other universities, and written with the central problems of beginning researchers in mind, Bob Hancké guides them through the process of thinking about the links between theory, cases and data, and to do so in a way that helps to turn their initial plausible ideas into convincing arguments. This lively book, deliberately jargon-free and with a hands-on, pragmatic approach to research design, addresses the problems that research students face - or ignore, often at their peril - in the course of their first few years. Its central message is that research is a complex and iterative process in which researchers construct every relevant part of their project with one goal in mind: make a persuasive point. They define the question they ask and the debate they engage, construct their cases and data to answer that question, and write it up as an argument that brings out the strengths of their research design. It addresses such key issues as statistical versus configurational approaches, time in social science research, different types of case studies and comparative research, and a critical approach to data. The Appendix gives tips on presenting and discussing papers, and on crafting research proposals.

This book offers advice to doctoral researchers and graduate and advanced undergraduate students on how to embark on their research. Based on a decade of teaching early-stage researchers in the social sciences at the LSE and other universities, and written with the central problems of beginning researchers in mind, Bob Hancké guides them through the process of thinking about the links between theory, cases and data, and to do so in a way that helps to turn their initial plausible ideas into convincing arguments. This lively book, deliberately jargon-free and with a hands-on, pragmatic approach to research design, addresses the problems that research students face - or ignore, often at their peril - in the course of their first few years. Its central message is that research is a complex and iterative process in which researchers construct every relevant part of their project with one goal in mind: make a persuasive point. They define the question they ask and the debate they engage, construct their cases and data to answer that question, and write it up as an argument that brings out the strengths of their research design. It addresses such key issues as statistical versus configurational approaches, time in social science research, different types of case studies and comparative research, and a critical approach to data. The Appendix gives tips on presenting and discussing papers, and on crafting research proposals.

Between 1980 and 1985, the French economy and industry faced a dramatic crisis; in the ten years that followed, it witnessed a remarkable revival. How did the French economy make this transition? While the state is still an important economic agent in France, and the market certainly has become more central in the organization of the French economy, both state- and market-centered perspectives fail to understand critical elements of this adjustment. Building on the new Varieties of Capitalism approach in political economy which puts firms at the center of the analysis, this book argues that the post-war, state-led system changed into a system organized by and around the large firms. Large firms have always been central in the French post-war economic development model. In the past, however, they adapted to patterns set by the central state. By exploiting the possibilities in government policies in different areas such as finance, labour relations, and regional policies, the large firms were able to induce their main interlocutors - the state, banks, labour unions, workers, and small firms - to adjust in a way which was congruent with their own interests. From subservient economic agents, they became the drivers of economic adjustment. Through this case study of readjustment in France, this book offers a subtle critique of neo-institutionalist perspectives on firms. Institutional frameworks do not simply offer scenarios for adjustment, but are themselves constructions of economic and political actors and therefore subject to change and reorganization. By analysing how large firms in France, arguably one of the least likely places to harbour such endogenous capacities, changed their institutional environment to fit their own needs, this book offers an important new perspective on the political economy of industrial and economic change.