1Introduction: Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies

The chapters in this volume were written as a collective contribution to the current debate in political science and sociology on institutional change. Instead of abstract theoretical reasoning, they offer in-depth empirical case studies. The underlying assumption, amply supported by recent literature, is that there is a wide but not infinite variety of modes of institutional change that can meaningfully be distinguished and analytically compared. It is also assumed that an empirically grounded typology of institutional change that does justice to the complexity and versatility of the subject can offer important insights on mechanisms of social and political stability and evolution generally. Empirically the chapters of this book deal with current changes in selected political-economic institutions of rich, mostly Western democracies. To us the most prominent theoretical frameworks employed in the analysis of the welfare state and of contemporary political economy generally seem singularly ill-equipped to capture significant developments underway in many if not all of them. While we join with a large literature that rejects the notion that previously diverse political economies ar