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crumble, and reform in each crisis period.” (p. 10). The second book that informs this
project is Kathleen Thelen’s How Institutions Evolve (2004) because it captures the
dynamism and variability of political institutions. It “provides insights into modes of
institutional change that are incremental but cumulatively transformative…and it
identifies the political processes through which the form and function of institutions can
be radically transfigured over time.” (flyleaf). Finally, Paul Pierson’s Politics in Time
(2004) reminds those who address issues of political structures and the literature of
historical institutional analysis that “placing politics in time – constructing “moving
pictures” rather than snapshots – can vastly enrich our understanding of complex social
dynamics and greatly improve the theories and methods that we use to explain them.
(overleaf).
The larger project will be comprised of seven chapters:
Chapter 1: Introduction: The End of the German Model? General overview of the
project and evaluation whether organized capitalism can recognizably revive, give way to
neo-liberal economic policy, or mutate toward a hybrid model.
Chapter 2: The Liberal Market Threat to Organized Capitalist Regimes. This chapter
will be a broad overview of the sharp erosion of CME economic performance during the
past decade and a half. It analyzes how a deeply embedded set of institutional structures,
founded on a set of ideas requiring broad-scale and coordinated action, have struggled to
respond to the powerful threat of hyper-mobile markets. It also will analyze why CME
models have generally failed to perform effectively in a context of politically accountable
representative social market-oriented democracy. In short, it will review the conventional
Convention