Commentary: The Politics of Elective Affinities

This volume makes an invaluable contribution to comparative political economy by highlighting elective affinities between multiple institutional domains of the economy. The contributors have devoted most of their attention to the logic of ‘institutional complementarities’ between different domains, and their impact on economic coordination and performance. They are less interested in the political sources of these arrangements. This choice of emphasis is not accidental. In the wake of the economic shocks of the 1970s, when political scientists and sociologists set about developing what Goldthorpe (1984) described as a “new political economy”, they were motivated to no small extent by a burning desire to demonstrate to both economists and sceptics in their own disciplines that “politics matters”. With the zeal typical of this type of paradigmatic struggle, many of the protagonists lost sight of the fact that political economy is about the mutual interaction and embeddedness of politics and the economy. With the decline of Keynesian discourse and the rise of global capitalism, a new intellectual swing has occurred characterized by integration of economic models and methods, on the one hand, and on the other, greater attention to institutions—where economists and political scientists share potential common ground. I believe that it is time for a corrective, a reminder of the distinctive contribution that political sociologists and political scientists can and should make to the study of comparative political economy. Politics do matter, although there is an unsettled debate about what type of politics matter most. A second assumption guiding this commentary is that this debate