Governing Growth: The Postwar Transformations of Capitalism and Democracy

A groundbreaking account of how politics and economics have interacted in Western democracies over the past eighty yearsHow do capitalist economies change over time? And what political consequences follow? In Governing Growth, Peter Hall traces the interactions between politics and economics in Western democracies over the past eighty years, identifying a series of profound shifts in the political economies of Europe and the United States.Hall develops the concept of successive growth regimes, each the result of public policies interacting with the strategies of private firms.Alongside each growth regime, he argues, there is a distinctive representation regime, which determines whose voices have the most influence over public policy.Showing how these two regimes interact, he develops a new account of the processes through which political economies change over time. Hall outlines three postwar growth regimes: an era of modernization, from 1945 to about 1975; an era of liberalization, fr