The Political Economy of the Service Transition

Abstract

In recent decades, the world’s most developed economies— commonly labeled the advanced industrial democracies— have faced massive structural change. Industrial sectors, which once formed the economic backbone of these societies, have shrunk inexorably in size and economic significance, while service sectors have taken over as the primary engines of output and employment expansion. While all of the most economically advanced democracies are experiencing deindustrialization, however, significant variations exist in the rate of service sector expansion, or in the nature of this expansion across countries— that is, in the types of service sectors which expand (e.g., traded or nontraded, high or low productivity, ICT intensive or non) and in the type of service employment ( e.g., high or low skilled) which is created. These differences are closely related to a range of distributive outcomes such as wage inequality, insider– outsider divisions, and women’s participation and position in the labor market. They are also linked with distinctive electoral dynamics, and patterns of partisan politics and political coalition formation. In this volume, we focus our analysis on this cross- national variation. We argue that it is rooted in differences in political- institutional configurations at the national level: in the ways in which different types of socioeconomic regimes ( or “ varieties of capitalism”) manage the service transition. And we explore its economic, distributional, and ultimately political implications. The book is a systematic attempt to understand the distinct political economy of postindustrial societies, and the varying forms which it takes in different nation- institutional contexts.

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