Socio-Economic Review Advance Access published online on September 7, 2007
Socio-Economic Review, doi:10.1093/ser/mwm009
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Institutional complementarities and institutional dynamics: exploring varieties in European football capitalism*
Centre for European Integration, Otto-Suhr-Institut, Free University Berlin, Germany
Correspondence: meierhe{at}zedat.fu-berlin.de
The article takes on the recent criticism about excessive determinism in institutionalist research in comparative political economy. It is argued that institutionalist reasoning holds too strong assumptions about the existence of self-reinforcing features of institutional configurations. In particular, such features are unlikely to be found in institutional configurations in domains shaped by competing logics. For such sectors, a ‘more political’ theory of institutional dynamics referring to the coalitional base of institutional configurations and stabilising efforts by political elites seems more appropriate. The paper provides empirical support for these claims by a comparison of the dynamics of the British and German football industries.
Key Words: varieties of capitalism • embeddedness • causal mechanisms • capabilities
* Research presented within this article has been funded by a grant from the German Science Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG), grant number: ME 2755/1-1. The author is very grateful for comments by two anonymous reviewers and the editor which helped to considerably improve its reasoning and the presentation of the empirical evidence. Moreover, the author wants to kindly thank Hanna Bäck for helping him to deal with the difficulties of the English language.