Politics & Society just accepted our paper “Revisiting the Politics of Growth Models: Germany and the European Economic and Monetary Union” (with Paul Marx). We hope the paper will spark some discussions. Here is the abstract:
This paper advances the debate on the agency of political actors in Comparative Political Economy (CPE) theories, focusing on Growth Model Theory (GMT). GMT expects stable coalitions around dominant economic sectors, which support growth strategies through lobbying and ideological influence. Despite the explicit goal to account for the domestic politics of growth models, GMT has not developed a politics model that captures agency, uncertainty, and conflict. It thus retains the core problems of the structuralist approaches common in CPE: the reification of policy processes as ‘blocs’ or ‘coalitions,’ a presentism that infers preferences from outcomes, and a narrow focus on economic interests. We propose an alternative politics model based cultural schema theory. This model can incorporate conflicting motives, interpretive frameworks, and strategic uncertainty in the formation of growth strategies, while also accounting for these strategies’ potential persistence. We examine these two politics models through a case study of Germany’s political debate on the European Economic and Monetary Union—in hindsight a major benefit for Germany’s export-led model. Historical evidence reveals deep divisions among policymakers, shaped by uncertainty, geopolitics, national-identity concerns, and short-term opportunism in response to intra-party and electoral threats. These findings challenge the idea of dominant growth coalitions but lend support to our alternative politics model based on cultural schemas.
Patrick Emmenegger 