Who determines growth strategies, and what shapes growth model trajectories?
This presentation will emphasise political agency, coalitions, and ideas as key explanatory factors. It traces the Italian and German macroeconomic policies across almost three decades, focusing on major fiscal, wage and industrial policy decisions from the EMU establishment to the 2020s poly-crisis.
We will analyse critically with an often-functionalist tendency in comparative political economy to treat growth strategies as functional results of a country’s productive structure or of the preferences of its dominant producer groups, and rather argues that these factors underdetermine them. To do so, we develop and apply a coalitional and ideational account of the politics of growth models, in which producer group preferences are loosely anchored to the economic structure but malleable, contingent, and politically constructed. Parties retain a relative autonomy from both structure and the organised interests whose support they nonetheless require.
Policy outcomes therefore depend on the constant, creative political work of constructing and challenging growth coalitions and strategies. The argument rests on an abductive comparative process tracing, built on semi-structured elite interviews with policymakers, party officials, economic advisers, and business and union representatives, together with a systematic qualitative document analysis triangulated with macroeconomic data. Analytically, the presentation will treat growth model stasis and evolution as political processes. It proposes a typology of growth strategies that distinguishes their direction –rebalancing or doubling down– and their content –compensatory or transformative. Likewise, the thesis studies decarbonization bargains as instances of political exchange and vehicles for growth model transformation.
Empirically, we will show the role of agency and domestic politics by reconstructing several policy decisions and debates, as well as producers’ and parties’ internal divisions and alternative coalitions. Theoretically, ultimately reframes an Italian trajectory too often read as the product of external constraints, and nuances the image of the German model reproducing itself semi-functionally.
Gabriele Beretta is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences of the Scuola Normale Superiore. His research lies at the intersection of comparative and international political economy, comparative politics, and European Union economic governance. His doctoral thesis examines the evolution of fiscal, wage, and industrial policies in Italy and Germany, from austerity to post-pandemic expansion, from the European Green Deal to the reform of the Stability and Growth Pact. In explaining different trajectories of policymaking and growth models, he emphasizes the combined role of different industrial and political coalitions, their agency and ideas, as well as sectoral and productive transformations. During his PhD, he visited the Jacques Delors Centre (Hertie School) in Berlin and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, where he was also a research assistant on the Italian Elites Project, led by Professors Lucio Baccaro and Arianna Tassinari. He is a founding member of the Economic Sociology and Political Economy Working Group at SNS, and a coordinator of the 2026 Spring School in Political Economy of Production and Labor. He holds an MA in International Affairs from the University of Bologna and a BA in Political Science and International Relations from the University of Pavia.
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