ON PHILIP RATHGEB’S HOW THE RADICAL RIGHT HAS CHANGED CAPITALISM AND WELFARE IN EUROPE AND THE USA

Comparative political economy took several years to catch up with the profound transformation of party politics that has occurred in advanced industrial nations over the past few decades. Until about a decade ago, traditional political economy models examining the relationship between (electoral) politics and socio-economic policies—particularly welfare and redistribution—operated under the assumption of a classic left-right divide. In this framework, workers would vote for the left to demand redistribution, while capital would vote for the right to limit state intervention, echoing Walter Korpi’s (1983) theory of the “democratic class struggle.” However, these assumptions about political alignments have been increasingly challenged. The realignment of working-class voters had already begun in Europe long before scholars fully acknowledged it. Researchers such as Kriesi and colleagues have highlighted how the political space has been transformed by issues such as immigration and the rise of the radical right (Kriesi et al. 2008), which has successfully mobilized significant support among blue-collar workers (Afonso and Rennwald 2018; Oesch and Rennwald 2018). It took additional time for political economists to consider how these realignments—particularly through the incumbency of radical right parties—would influence the core institutions of capitalism and social protection across advanced economies.