Culpepper, p. 28
in a pair of power plays that they won based on their ability to impose an agreement on
others.
These findings raise two points that merit further inquiry. First, this finding holds,
in both directions, across cases typically categorized as liberal market economies as well
as coordinated market economies (cf. Hall and Soskice 2001). The case of a durable
move to coordinated institutions in Ireland, in particular, appears to be inconsistent with
the strong claims of institutional complementarity made by Hall and Soskice (cf. Ornston
2004). Despite its liberal systems of finance and of vocational education and training,
Irish wage bargaining has moved to a highly coordinated system and remained stable for
more than fifteen years. This issue is one that requires further research to resolve more
definitively. Second, this paper has focused on changes at the leadership level, which is
where agreements in industrial relations are generally struck. The questions of how the
views of the leadership are debated and become common knowledge across membership
organizations is one that has been examined closely in the case of unions by Baccaro
(2002a and b). How such shifts in belief are debated and legitimated in employers’
associations is something we know little about (cf. C. Martin 2000 for a study of
American employers). Given the centrality of employers to the cases of institutional
change studied here, and the general trend in comparative political economy toward
closer analytical attention to the interests of employers, this could be a productive frontier
for future research.
Convention