Mark Blyth
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 412081 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Mark Blyth |
| NOMBRES | Mark |
| APELLIDO | Blyth |
| FIRMA | BLYTH M |
| AFILIACIONES | Johns Hopkins University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7782-6183 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 50 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 1813 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 45 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 5 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1997 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 15 |
Macrofinance and the green transformation
Decarbonising national growth models
What do central bankers talk about when they talk about inflation? The rise and fall of inflation narratives
There is more to national economies than the national economy
This article argues that the Growth Model (GM) research programme in comparative political economy has an ontological and methodological bias towards the national level that generates an implicit functionalist-reductionism. This is a problem because GM research is explicitly designed to be a theory that eschews the functionalist-equilibrium New Keynesian assumptions of Varieties of Capitalism theory. To overcome this problem, we make the case tha…
Brexit and the ties that bind
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Introduction
This introductory essay flashes out the “growth model” perspective and provides a framework for the chapters in the volume. It makes five interrelated arguments. First, existing theoretical frameworks are ill equipped to tackle the politics of growth and stagnation because of their almost exclusive focus on “supply side institutionalism.” Second, political economists need to take macroeconomics more seriously but also be more critical of mainstre…
Diminishing Returns
Over fifty years ago Andrew Shonfeld wrote a book, Modern Capitalism, which initiated a new field of inquiry about ‘comparative capitalism.’ His focus was the politics of the mixed economy and its national variants. At the basis of that politics was not just a concern with ‘who gets what’ in a static sense, but also how the various hybrid forms of capitalism were able to address problems of accumulation and growth more effectively than in previou…
How should we think about modern capitalism? A growth models approach
The Global Economics of European Populism
The expanding literature on growth regimes has recently been applied to explain the growth of populist movements across the OECD. Such applications posit a stand-off between debtors and creditors as the core conflict that generates populism. While insightful, the theory has problems explaining why, in some European countries, such movements pre-date both the global financial crisis and the austerity measures that followed, factors that are common…
From Big Bang to Big Crash
Using newly declassified documents from the British Public Records Office, we argue that the finance-dependent growth regime that typified the UK economy in the period up to the Great Crash of 2008 has much deeper roots than is commonly realised. We use these documents to demonstrate that the growth of finance was integral to the Thatcher revolution, tying together mortgage markets, household debt, and boom-bust cycles as early as the mid-1980s. …
When Is It Rational to Learn the Wrong Lessons? Technocratic Authority, Social Learning, and Euro Fragility
Why do bad policy ideas persist over time? We trace the development of the euro’s governing ideas over fiscal and monetary policy in the face of mounting evidence that continued adherence to those ideas was economically deleterious. We argue that a specific form of social learning, framed by a retrospective recoding in 2010–2012 of Europe’s experience with fiscal rules in 2003–2005, drove European elites to pursue policies that were economically …
Black Swans, Lame Ducks, and the mystery of IPE's missing macroeconomy
Britain's BREXIT vote and Trump's victory in the US presidential elections sent shockwaves through the Western liberal establishment, including academia. Both events suggest yet another ‘rethinking’ of International Political Economy (IPE). Yet we have been here before. After the global financial crisis of 2008, ‘Open Economy Politics’ (OEP) was criticized for being unable to either anticipate or adequately explain the global financial crisis. No…
The New Ideas Scholarship in the Mirror of Historical Institutionalism
Scholars interested in the interaction of ideas, power and public policy fired their first salvoes over 30 years ago. Deborah Stone's ‘Causal stories and the formation of policy agendas’ (1989) and
The Future of the Euro
Future of the Euro is an attempt by political economists to analyze the fundamental causes of the euro crisis, determine how it can be fixed, and consider what likely futures lie ahead for the currency. The book makes three interrelated arguments that emphasize the primacy of political over economic factors. First, the 'euro problem' is discussed as the result of the single currency's fundamental lack of institutional embeddedness, insofar as its…
Constructing the International Economy
Future of the Euro
Walter A. Friedman. Fortune Tellers
Journal Article Walter A. Friedman. Fortune Tellers: The Story of America's First Economic Forecasters. Get access Walter A. Friedman. Fortune Tellers: The Story of America's First Economic Forecasters. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014. Pp. xi, 273. Cloth $29.95, e-book $27.95. Mark Blyth Mark Blyth Brown University [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historic…
Austerity
Austerity as ideology
Constructivism and the study of international political economy in China
This paper surveys constructivist scholarship in the study of international political economy (IPE) in China. Chinese scholars in the field of IPE have until recently rarely used constructivism as an approach to study IPE for two reasons. The first, like Western IPE, is the short history of constructivism as a theoretical perspective. The second, unlike Western IPE, stems from the long-standing dominance of Marxism, China's official state ideolog…
The BRICs and the Washington Consensus
Paradigms and Paradox
This article argues that there is a paradox at the heart of Hall's “Policy Paradigms” framework stemming from the desire to see both state and society as generative of social learning while employing two different logics to explain how such learning takes place: what I term the “Bayesian” and “constructivist” versions of the policy paradigms causal story. This creates a paradox as both logics cannot be simultaneously true. However, it is a genera…
The Ghosts of Corporatism's Past and Past Corporatisms
This paper is a comment on: The Constitutional Economy of Dynamism and Inclusion: An Inquiry into the Causes of Argentine Economic Decadence by Juan Vicente Sola which can be found at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2209113; Corporatism and the Ghost of the Third Way by Randall Morck and Bernard Yin Yeung which can be found at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2209136; and Promoting Innovation: The Law of Publicly Traded Corporations by Merritt B. Fox which ca…
What can Okun teach Polanyi? Efficiency, regulation and equality in the OECD
Arthur Okun famously argued that “effciency is bought at the cost of inequalities in income and wealth”. Okun's trade-off represents the antithesis to Karl Polanyi's view of the relationship that the more embedded markets are in society, the better the social and economic outcomes they produce. This paper refines both these views. We argue that not all forms of market embeddedness are created equal, and that the relationship between equality and …
Ideas, Uncertainty, and Evolution
This chapter argues that ideational scholarship rests, implicitly or explicitly, on a particular way of looking at the world, a distinct social ontology. It uses this understanding to make the further case that unless one is practicing a self-consciously ideational social science, one might be, as Keynes famously put it, a Euclidian geometer in a non-Euclidian world. That is, to continue his geometric metaphor, we might live in world of knots and…
Austerity
"Any More Bright Ideas?" The Ideational Turn of Comparative Political Economy
Structures Do Not Come with an Instruction Sheet
This article questions the centrality of interest-based explanation in political science. Through an examination of the “turn to ideas” undertaken in the past decade by rationalist and nonrationalist scholars in both comparative politics and international relations, it seeks to make three points. First, interests are far from the unproblematic and ever-ready explanatory instruments we assume them to be. Second, the ideational turn of historical i…
The Transformation of the Swedish Model
This article examines the transformation of the Swedish model of economic regulation from an ideational perspective. While the majority of arguments about the decline of the Swedish model have focused on the role of structural factors, this article looks to illuminate the ideational factors that made possible both the emergence and the transformation of the Swedish model. The article details how, during the 1930s and 1940s, economic ideas provide…
Exogenous Shocks or Endogenous Constructions? The Meanings of Wars and Crises
This symposium addresses the role of wars and crises as mechanisms of international change. Over the past two decades, the international system has undergone a number of remarkable transformations, from the end of the Cold War to the emergence of an ongoing ''War on Terror,'' and from the collapse of statist development models to the emergence of a contested-if evolving-neoliberal ''Washington Consensus.'' This volatility exceeds any underlying s…
Paradigms and Paradox
This article argues that there is a paradox at the heart of Hall's “Policy Paradigms” framework stemming from the desire to see both state and society as generative of social learning while employing two different logics to explain how such learning takes place: what I term the “Bayesian” and “constructivist” versions of the policy paradigms causal story. This creates a paradox as both logics cannot be simultaneously true. However, it is a genera…
From Catch-all Politics to Cartelisation
Adaptations to coordination problems endogenous to political parties have established the cartel party as the emerging equilibrium type in modern Western democracies. However, these factors alone are insufficient to maintain such an equilibrium given the threat of defection. That threat is mitigated by three factors: historical changes in party form, systemic changes in the global economy and changed ideas about governments. Together, these chang…
Constructing the International Economy
Black Swans, Lame Ducks, and the mystery of IPE's missing macroeconomy
Britain's BREXIT vote and Trump's victory in the US presidential elections sent shockwaves through the Western liberal establishment, including academia. Both events suggest yet another ‘rethinking’ of International Political Economy (IPE). Yet we have been here before. After the global financial crisis of 2008, ‘Open Economy Politics’ (OEP) was criticized for being unable to either anticipate or adequately explain the global financial crisis. No…
When Is It Rational to Learn the Wrong Lessons? Technocratic Authority, Social Learning, and Euro Fragility
Why do bad policy ideas persist over time? We trace the development of the euro’s governing ideas over fiscal and monetary policy in the face of mounting evidence that continued adherence to those ideas was economically deleterious. We argue that a specific form of social learning, framed by a retrospective recoding in 2010–2012 of Europe’s experience with fiscal rules in 2003–2005, drove European elites to pursue policies that were economically …
Powering, Puzzling, or Persuading? The Mechanisms of Building Institutional Orders
This article offers an agent-centered constructivist analysis of institution building; that of the "first" New Deal of the National Recovery Administration. It argues that in moments of uncertainty generated by the failure of existing institutions, institutional choice becomes underdetermined by structure and open to attempts at creative and underdetermined inter-elite persuasion. What matters in such moments are the locally generated "crisis-def…
The Global Economics of European Populism
The expanding literature on growth regimes has recently been applied to explain the growth of populist movements across the OECD. Such applications posit a stand-off between debtors and creditors as the core conflict that generates populism. While insightful, the theory has problems explaining why, in some European countries, such movements pre-date both the global financial crisis and the austerity measures that followed, factors that are common…
The BRICs and the Washington Consensus
Great Punctuations
I argue that comparative politics has been shaped by two "Great Punctuations" that, on each occasion, transformed our conceptions of what the subfield is and what we do. Just before a punctuation occurs, the subfield seems especially coherent, united by a set of common assumptions, methods, theories, and so on, which are then punctuated by a series of events that destroys faith in them. The subfield then reconstitutes itself around new assumption…
Same as it Never Was
Coping With the Black Swan
Nassim Taleb rightly points out that although people may acknowledge in the abstract that the world is uncertain, they still behave as if a large enough sample size is all that is needed to predict, and model, the future. He also rightly notes that ever‐increasing quantities of information are relevant only in simple situations, such as in predicting the range of human height, but are misleading in more random arenas, such as financial markets. H…
Moving the Political Middle
Brexit and the ties that bind
Formulae display:?Mathematical formulae have been encoded as MathML and are displayed in this HTML version using MathJax in order to improve their display. Uncheck the box to turn MathJax off. This feature requires Javascript. Click on a formula to zoom
From Big Bang to Big Crash
Using newly declassified documents from the British Public Records Office, we argue that the finance-dependent growth regime that typified the UK economy in the period up to the Great Crash of 2008 has much deeper roots than is commonly realised. We use these documents to demonstrate that the growth of finance was integral to the Thatcher revolution, tying together mortgage markets, household debt, and boom-bust cycles as early as the mid-1980s. …
The New Ideas Scholarship in the Mirror of Historical Institutionalism
Scholars interested in the interaction of ideas, power and public policy fired their first salvoes over 30 years ago. Deborah Stone's ‘Causal stories and the formation of policy agendas’ (1989) and
What can Okun teach Polanyi? Efficiency, regulation and equality in the OECD
Arthur Okun famously argued that “effciency is bought at the cost of inequalities in income and wealth”. Okun's trade-off represents the antithesis to Karl Polanyi's view of the relationship that the more embedded markets are in society, the better the social and economic outcomes they produce. This paper refines both these views. We argue that not all forms of market embeddedness are created equal, and that the relationship between equality and …
Decarbonising national growth models
The Politics of Compounding Bubbles
The State of the Discipline in American Political Science
This article is an attempt to survey and analyse current developments in American political science with particular reference to the current wave of institutionalist theory. The main thrust of this article is to argue that the current concerns of the field are hardly new issues, but rather perennial. We argue that the current ‘state of the discipline’ is in many ways more a function of recurrent intellectual dilemmas of a general social scientifi…
Macrofinance and the green transformation
Moving the Political Middle
"Any More Bright Ideas?" The Ideational Turn of Comparative Political Economy
The State of the Discipline in American Political Science
This article is an attempt to survey and analyse current developments in American political science with particular reference to the current wave of institutionalist theory. The main thrust of this article is to argue that the current concerns of the field are hardly new issues, but rather perennial. We argue that the current ‘state of the discipline’ is in many ways more a function of recurrent intellectual dilemmas of a general social scientifi…
Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System
Journal Article Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System Get access Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System by Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly J. Silver. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1999. 366 pp. Paper, $22.95 Mark Blyth Mark Blyth Johns Hopkins University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science Quarterly, Volume 115, Issue 1, Spring 2000, Pages 143–144, https://doi.or…
The Transformation of the Swedish Model
This article examines the transformation of the Swedish model of economic regulation from an ideational perspective. While the majority of arguments about the decline of the Swedish model have focused on the role of structural factors, this article looks to illuminate the ideational factors that made possible both the emergence and the transformation of the Swedish model. The article details how, during the 1930s and 1940s, economic ideas provide…
Great Transformations
This book picks up where Karl Polanyi's study of economic and political change left off. Building upon Polanyi's conception of the double movement, Blyth analyzes the two periods of deep seated institutional change that characterized the twentieth century: the 1930s and the 1970s. Blyth views both sets of changes as part of the same dynamic. In the 1930s labor reacted against the exigencies of the market and demanded state action to mitigate the …
Same as it Never Was
From Comparative Capitalism to Economic Constructivism
The Cornell Series in Political Economy was established twenty years ago by Cornell University Press. Since 1982 over 70 titles have appeared under its auspices, and over time the series has established itself as perhaps the leading political economy series in the USA. What makes the Cornell Series distinctive is how it has consistently eschewed both formal fads, for example, hard-core rational choice analyses, and thematic diversions, for exampl…
Our past as prologue
This editorial introduction to the tenth anniversary issue of the Review of International Political Economy places both the birth of RIPE the journal and the critiques that it has spawned of the so-called ‘Washington consensus’ in a longer historical context. We map the emergence of two distinct ‘Washington Consensi’ – one based around GATT/Bretton Woods/Welfare States/and Kenynesian ideas and one based around the WTO/Open Capital Accounts/Hard C…
Structures Do Not Come with an Instruction Sheet
This article questions the centrality of interest-based explanation in political science. Through an examination of the “turn to ideas” undertaken in the past decade by rationalist and nonrationalist scholars in both comparative politics and international relations, it seeks to make three points. First, interests are far from the unproblematic and ever-ready explanatory instruments we assume them to be. Second, the ideational turn of historical i…
The Futures of European Capitalism
The Futures of European Capitalism. By Vivien A. Schmidt. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 376p. $18.95. This is a multilevel book that deals with a multilayered topic. It operates on three levels, the national, the European, and the global, and has three distinct (albeit related) objectives. The first objective is to chart the courses that the three main types of European capitalism (liberal, state, and managed) have taken since the 1970…
The great transformation in understanding Polanyi
Santhi Hejeebu and Deirdre McCloskey's rebuttal to Karl Polanyi's Great Transformation begs several important questions. Yes, commerce can be found throughout human history—but is that the same as saying that people have been equally capitalistic at all times? If not, then how did modern capitalism come into being? Hejeebu and McCloskey portray capitalism as having evolved gradually, indeed quite naturally, rather than being a contingent product …
Domestic Institutions and the Possibility of Social Democracy
From Catch-all Politics to Cartelisation
Adaptations to coordination problems endogenous to political parties have established the cartel party as the emerging equilibrium type in modern Western democracies. However, these factors alone are insufficient to maintain such an equilibrium given the threat of defection. That threat is mitigated by three factors: historical changes in party form, systemic changes in the global economy and changed ideas about governments. Together, these chang…
Great Punctuations
I argue that comparative politics has been shaped by two "Great Punctuations" that, on each occasion, transformed our conceptions of what the subfield is and what we do. Just before a punctuation occurs, the subfield seems especially coherent, united by a set of common assumptions, methods, theories, and so on, which are then punctuated by a series of events that destroys faith in them. The subfield then reconstitutes itself around new assumption…
One Ring to Bind Them All
In 2007, the United States government will spend more on its armed forces than all other countries combined. This fact, plus U.S. operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, tensions with Iran, and the “war on terror,” all make it easy to forget that American power is not based solely on its military might. At a time when pundits and policy makers alike speak of the “unipolar moment” or a new age of “empire,” it should make us pause to consider what such…
Exogenous Shocks or Endogenous Constructions? The Meanings of Wars and Crises
This symposium addresses the role of wars and crises as mechanisms of international change. Over the past two decades, the international system has undergone a number of remarkable transformations, from the end of the Cold War to the emergence of an ongoing ''War on Terror,'' and from the collapse of statist development models to the emergence of a contested-if evolving-neoliberal ''Washington Consensus.'' This volatility exceeds any underlying s…
Powering, Puzzling, or Persuading? The Mechanisms of Building Institutional Orders
This article offers an agent-centered constructivist analysis of institution building; that of the "first" New Deal of the National Recovery Administration. It argues that in moments of uncertainty generated by the failure of existing institutions, institutional choice becomes underdetermined by structure and open to attempts at creative and underdetermined inter-elite persuasion. What matters in such moments are the locally generated "crisis-def…
The Politics of Compounding Bubbles
Routledge Handbook of International Political Economy (IPE)
An Approach to Comparative Analysis or a Subfield Within a Subfield?
The first edition of this volume featured a chapter on political economy by Peter A. Hall (Hall 1997). In it, Hall sought to define political economy by asking the following question: In the subset of those scholars who study the comparative politics of the advanced industrial states, how are political economy explanations constructed? Seen from this vantage, political economy, Hall answered, appears as a field defined by a specific set of concep…
Routledge handbook of international political economy (IPE)
Torn Between Two Lovers? Caught in the Middle of British and American IPE1
Giovanni Arrighi – 7 July 1937–18 June 2009
One of the most important figures in the field of International Political Economy, Giovanni Arrighi, passed away 18 June 2009. His contributions across multiple fields during a career of over 40 ye
Coping With the Black Swan
Nassim Taleb rightly points out that although people may acknowledge in the abstract that the world is uncertain, they still behave as if a large enough sample size is all that is needed to predict, and model, the future. He also rightly notes that ever‐increasing quantities of information are relevant only in simple situations, such as in predicting the range of human height, but are misleading in more random arenas, such as financial markets. H…
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