Beyond Stability: Rethinking Germany’s Political Economy

From the post-war period up to the early 2000s, (West) Germany was viewed as a paradigmatic case of institutional stability, successfully accommodating different social interests. Yet the past two decades have brought large-scale changes to the structures of Germany’s political and economic life. This article introduces a special issue that seeks to rethink Germany’s political economy by shifting the scholarly lens on Germany from stability to imbalance. After outlining the proposed paradigm shift, and introducing three vantage points from which to study the politics of imbalance, this article presents the main findings that contributors to the special issue unearthed as they engaged this theoretical agenda in their empirical analyses.