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Daniel Buhr and I published an article on enlarging varieties of capitalism in Business and Politics dealing with Incorporated Capitalism. The economic success of state-led forms of capitalism in Russia, China and some other autocracies is one of the most challenging developments for existing typologies of comparative political economy research. For the OECD-World complex theories and models assess the interrelation of polity and economy (e.g., Hall/Soskice), while well defined and systematic approaches for autocracies are seldomly found. Most of the existing work are rather idiosyncratic case studies. We argue that by climbing up the ladder of abstraction (Sartori), we gain analytical leverage and comparability between cases and regions. That’s why we’ve developped an idealtype called “incorporated capitalism.” By looking at statecapitalist developments in China, Singapore, Saudi-Arabia or Russia, there is strong empirical evidence for a variety of “incorporated capitalism”: bureaucratic market economies and patrimonial market economies. Why are those types of capitalism so successful? In order to answer this question correctly, we have to
consider other questions first: 1) Which are the specific patterns of interaction between polity and economy? 2) What are the unique governance mechanisms in those incorporated capitalisms? Using mainly qualitative methods we will empirically proof our theoretical findings in order to decode the special complementarities of the bureaucratic and patrimonial market economy in those four real types mentioned above.

Read the full article here or, in case you do not get free access contact me for a manuscript. Comments and discussion welcome.