Abstract

This article examines the growth strategies of governments in the developed democracies and asks under what conditions and when do such strategies change? Growth strategies reflect the overall character of the economic and social policies that endures over a period of decades with some emphasis on the extent and complexion of government intervention. The argument is that three conditions are necessary for a change in growth strategies of this magnitude. There must be a motivation which usually derives from a manifest failure of policy with political resonance, a means supplied by newly popular sets of economic ideas, and a motor based on electoral pressure rooted in how the political cleavage structures of the day push certain issues to the top of the political agenda. This argument is substantiated with reference to the movement from the growth strategies of the inter-war years to those of the Keynesian welfare state following the Second World War and the subsequent movement from that growth strategy to the neoliberal growth strategy of the 1980s and 1990s. These examples provide the basis for an argument that growth strategies might be on the point of changing again in the face of failures associated with economic precarity and inequality, newly popular ideas about human capital and climate change, and the emergence of a new electoral cleavage between the winners and losers of globalization.