The Unassuming Economist

From a paper by Mischa Stratenwerth:

“This dissertation explores how the political stability of the macroeconomic policy regime underpinning the export-led German growth model has been maintained, despite the model’s uneven distributive outcomes. It combines document analysis and interviews to map the positions of trade unions and business organizations across fiscal, monetary, and eurozone policy debates – covering both relative winners and losers of the growth model. Expanding on emerging Gramsci-inspired conceptualizations of growth model politics, the study focuses on investigating coalitional patterns among producer groups and on the actor-specific mechanisms that secure their support, consent, or compliance. In doing so, it enriches the literature on growth model politics by offering an empirically grounded and conceptually nuanced perspective that complements and challenges broad-brush structuralist, functionalist, and culturalist explanations of the reproduction of growth frameworks. Overall, the in-depth research largely confirms expectations of a dominant growth coalition forming around key business interest groups, but paints a complex picture with regard to the positioning of non-core groups within these dynamic coalitional configurations. Findings indicate that the persistent reproduction of the export-oriented policy framework cannot be fully explained by interest alignment or ideational convergence, but additionally relies on a broader set of cohesion-sustaining mechanisms – ranging from compensation and depoliticalization to coercive enforcement, ignorance, and exclusion – that contribute to obscure distributive conflicts, encourage passive acquiescence, and contain dissent.”