EUI - Bridging the Divide: Partisan Business Cycles and Globalization

This project aims to contribute to the emergent literature on growth models within the field of comparative political economy. It tries to do so in two main ways. First, by expanding the historical perspective back to 1945, thus including the trente glorieuses of economic growth in the post-war period. This allows for an expansion of the types of growth models beyond the ideal types of export and credit led models that dominate the current literature. A main research question is whether the growth models that existed during the Bretton Woods era of limited international capital mobility exhibited the same interdependent and, ultimately, destabilizing dynamics as the one observed between current export and credit led models. Second, this project emphasizes the distributional effects of different growth models. In particular, it seeks to shed light on the connection between a country's growth model and its functional income distribution.

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In recent decades, work on partisan cycles has turned towards more specific (instrumental) indicators after falling to reproduce partisan differences in macroeconomic outcomes. This research proposal seeks to explain this partisan convergence by reference to the literature on international capital money. I hypothesize that the increased mobility of capital since the breakdown of Bretton Woods has constrained the ability of leftist parties to pursue economic policies that benefit their core constituents. I aim to undertake a mixed methodology comparative case study to test this hypothesis and identify possible intervening variables, such as different varieties of capitalism and labor market relations.