This volume grows out of conferences at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in September 1994 and Humboldt University, Berlin, in May 1995. It is the tangible result of long-standing and close relations of cooperation between members of the political science departments at UNC Chapel Hill and Duke University. Our desire to understand the dynamic patterns of political governance in advanced capitalist democracies brought us together. We embarked on this joint book project because we shared the belief that the mid-1990s offers a vantage point from which to assess the momentous political-economic changes of the preceding decade and a half.

In the early 1980s, all of us accepted the view that the presence of powerful organized economic interests and social democratic parties successfully created mixed economies promoting economic growth, cushioning economic investment risks, and protecting wage earners through comprehensive welfare states. By furnishing a distribution of life chances acceptable to the vast majority of citizens, such arrangements offered the best prospect for advancing social peace and stable democracy. From the perspective of the second half of the 1990s, we began to reexamine this view and set out to explore the extent to which conditions for economic growth, social peace, and political governance have changed. In discussions over a period of several months, we jointly identified key social conditions, international and domestic economic processes, political institutions, and mechanisms of policy making that amounted to what some may nostalgically call the “golden age” of post–World War II capitalism.