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19 Governance: An Int'l J. Pol'y, Admin, & Institutions 1 (2006)

handle is hein.journals/gvnanlj19 and id is 1 raw text is: Introduction: A Crisis of Governance in Japan and Europe ELLEN M. IMMERGUT* and IKUO KUME** The set of essays presented in this special issue of Governance is a result of a project launched by Ikuo Kume on the Political Economy of Crisis, under the auspices of the Japanese Political Science Association and the European Consortium for Political Research program to stimulate com- parative research on Japan and Europe. The idea was to bring together scholars of European and Japanese politics and to encourage cross- regional comparisons. As a substantive focus, we examined recent crises of governance in Sweden, Japan, and Germany. These countries were chosen because they represent outstanding examples of an alternative and (previously) successful model of governance. In contrast to the political economies of Britain and the United States-which analysts have typi- cally viewed as free market or liberal-those of Japan, Germany, and Sweden were termed neo-corporatist, consensual, socially embed- ded, and, most recently, coordinated market economies (terms that will be defined in more detail below, as well as in the essays that follow). In spite of their long records of economic success, however, these nations have recently experienced economic downturns and political problems. We interpret these crises as crises of governance, because the very organization of political and economic coordination in these countries has been called into question. Our project investigates the development and response to this crisis in a number of specific policy spheres-industrial relations, banking, economic policy, and electoral reform. By analyzing the renegotiation of the institutions of coordinated market economies in response to crisis, we aim to better understand how these political econ- omies work today, as well as the ways in which these governance models worked in the past. Discussions of such an alternate governance model have a long history. From the beginning of the twentieth century through the postwar period, numerous scholars, such as Rudolf Hilferding, Joseph Schum- peter, or Andrew Shonfield-to name just a few examples-pointed to various political and social institutions that made possible diverse types of capitalism. Responses to the economic crisis of the 1970s brought a *Humboldt University Berlin **Waseda University Governance: An International Journal of Policy, Administration, and Institutions, Vol. 19, No. 1, January 2006 (pp. 1-10). © 2006 The Authors Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main St., Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK. ISSN 0952-1895