PROPERTY-OWNING DEMOCRACY AND VARIETIES OF CAPITALISM

The article brings together two fields of the literature. One of them, inspired by John Rawls’ writings on liberal-egalitarian justice and types of institutional regimes, argues for capitalism reform through predistributive policies in the style of what Rawls, following the British economist James Meade, names “property-owning democracy”. The other is “varieties of capitalism”, a scholarship comparing capitalist production systems on the basis of the strategies employed by firms in order to fulfill their “core competencies” and the complementarities between distinct features of each production system. The goal is to bring into light differences and challenges to the realization of property-owning democracy’s predistributive policies under the circumstances of three varieties of capitalism: liberal, coordinated and hierarchical