Governing Growth: The Postwar Transformations of Capitalism and Democracy

In his talk, Peter A. Hall will discuss the arguments in his new book, Governing Growth. He asks: How do capitalist economies change over time? His focus is on how politics and economics interact in Western democracies over the past eighty years. Hall develops the concept of successive growth regimes, each the result of public policies interacting with the strategies of private firms. Alongside each growth regime, he argues that there are distinctive representation regimes, determining whose voices have the most influence over public policy. Showing how these two regimes interact, he develops a new account of the processes through which political economies change over time with implications for the relationship between capitalism and democracy.

Peter A. Hall is Krupp Foundation Professor of European Studies at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University. He is the author or editor of 12 books and more than 120 articles on comparative political economy, European politics, and institutional analysis. His two most recent books are Political Change and Electoral Coalitions in Western Democracies (with Georgina Evans and Sung In Kim) and Governing Growth: The Postwar Transformations of Capitalism and Democracy published by Princeton University Press in September 2026.