Continuity and change in contemporary capitalism

In the early 1980s, many observers, including authors and editors of this book, argued that powerful organized economic interests and social democratic parties created successful mixed economies promoting economic growth, full employment, and a modicum of social equality. The present book reexamines this argument from the vantage point of the second half of the 1990s, finding that the conventional wisdom no longer adequately reflects political and economic realities. Advanced democracies have responded in path-dependent fashion to such novel challenges as technological change, intensifying international competition, new social conflict, and the erosion of established patterns of political mobilization. Nevertheless, the book rejects the currently widespread expectation that "internationalization" makes all democracies converge on similar political and economic institutions and power relations. Diversity among capitalist democracies persists, though in a different fashion than in the "golden age" of rapid economic growth after World War II.