Growth, Democracy or Climate Action? The New Political Trilemma of Advanced Capitalism
Aidan Regan with Hanna Schwander, Cyril Benoît and Tim Vlandas (2026)
Governments face a conflicting choice between economic growth, democracy and tackling the climate crisis. They cannot achieve all three objectives simultaneously and the growing tensions between them are being played out in countries across the world. It is the new trilemma of advanced capitalist democracy.
The authors use this trilemma as a fresh analytic framework to conceptualize these trade-offs and tensions in the study of capitalist democracies. The type of democratic politics required to generate growth and prosperity within the ecological limits of the planet, they argue, has not been taken seriously in the study of comparative political economy and needs to be located at the heart of future research. Given the unprecedented scale of structural reform that governments need to implement to effectively tackle the climate crisis, the authors question whether the transition to carbon neutrality can be done within the liberal rulebook that has governed the politics of advanced capitalism for the past hundred years.
Confirmation Bias and Asymmetric Political Polarization: Evidence from a Media Experiment in Germany
Oscar Barrera-Rodríguez with Lora Pavlova & Li Yang (2025)
This paper examines how confirmation bias and media fragmentation jointly contribute to political polarization. As media environments become increasingly fragmented, individuals are exposed to distinct sets of information, reinforcing ideological divides and reducing shared understanding. We argue that confirmation bias not only drives selective exposure but also amplifies political polarization as fragmented information environments create self-reinforcing narratives. Using inflation perceptions in Germany as a case study, we provide empirical evidence that preferences on media consumption reinforce extreme political views and support for radical parties, more concretely towards the right. Additionally, we document a backfire effect, where exposure to contradictory information deepens ideological entrenchment. Our findings highlight the critical role of fragmented media landscapes and biased news consumption in shaping political attitudes and electoral behavior.
Capital vs. labour: The effect of income sources on attitudes toward the top 1 percent
Oscar Barrera-Rodríguez with Emmanuel Chávez (2025)
We conduct a randomized online survey to study how information on the share of top earners’ income derived from capital and labour affects attitudes toward top earners. Our findings re-veal that: (i) At the baseline, respondents tend to overestimate the income of the top 1 percent, have no clear priors on their capital vs. labor shares, and want them to pay a higher income tax rate than the current one; (ii) quantitative information on top earners’ income sources leads people to have more unfavorable views toward the rich; (iii) individuals most responsive to our treatments vote for left-wing candidates and have egalitarian notions of justice.
There is more to national economies than the national economy: extending the Growth Model research programme in comparative political economy
Aidan Regan with Mark Blyth (2025)
This article argues that the Growth Model (GM) research programme in comparative political economy has an ontological and methodological bias towards the national level that generates an implicit functionalist-reductionism. This is a problem because GM research is explicitly designed to be a theory that eschews the functionalist-equilibrium New Keynesian assumptions of Varieties of Capitalism theory. To overcome this problem, we make the case that focusing on the city-regional level within a global-systems level analysis allows for a better integration of comparative political economy with international political economy in GM research. In particular, we argue that focusing on where income growth is produced and concentrated within advanced capitalism (cities-regions) allows us to better explain the political consequences of unequal growth from a post-Keynesian GM-perspective.