The Political Construction of Business Interests

Cathie Jo Martin is Professor of Political Science at Boston University and former chair of the Council for European Studies. She is the author of Stuck in Neutral: Business and the Politics of Human Capital Investment Policy (2000) and Shifting the Burden: The Struggle over Growth and Corporate Taxation (1991) and has held fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute and the Russell Sage Foundation. Duane Swank is Professor of Political Science at Marquette University and Vice President/President-Elect of the American Political Science Association Organized Section in Comparative Politics. He is the author of Global Capital, Political Institutions, and Policy Change in Developed Welfare States (Cambridge 2002) and has held fellowships with the German Marshall Fund and at the Australian National University.

• Introduction; 1. Collective political engagement and the welfare state; 2. The political origins of coordinated capitalism; 3. The political origins of Danish employers' associations; 4. British experiments in national employers' organization; 5. Sectional parties, divided business in the United States; 6. The origins of sector coordination in Germany; 7. Twenty-first century breakdown: challenges to coordination in the post-industrial age; 8. Institutional sources of firms' preferences for the welfare state; 9. Employers, coordination, and active labor market policy in post-industrial Denmark; 10. Employers, coordination, and active labor market policy in post-industrial Britain; 11. The failure of coordination and rise of dualism in Germany; 12. The political foundations of redistribution and equality; Conclusion: 13. Social solidarity after the crisis of finance capitalism.

'Why do employers cooperate with the state in some nations, but elsewhere resist its incursions? How do employers become not just economic, but political actors? Such are the questions grappled with in this methodologically sophisticated, massively documented study that impressively covers both sides of the Atlantic from the nineteenth century to the present.' Peter Baldwin, University of California, Los Angeles