We have benefited a lot from this exchange, as well as from Boix’s splendid book. Without qualifying that judgment, we should probably correct a few potential misinterpretations he makes.

Our primary concern is to explain the extraordinary resilience of the advanced capitalist democratic state model through the deeply unstable century from 1920 to 2019. Ceteris paribus, governments have a strong incentive (as in Latin America) to engage in crony capitalism—to protect the markets and profits of domestic capitalists in exchange in one form or another for a share of those profits; such anticompetitive policies stand in the way of advanced technological innovation. Alternatively, the working class might have overturned advanced capitalism democratically. Both Schumpeter and Hayek saw democracy as dangerous for these reasons.

We argue instead that after democracy was established in the early 1920s in then-advanced capitalist economies, it played a central role in the subsequent century in ensuring that governments promoted advanced capitalism (with exceptions between 1935 and 1945). The result has been rapid technological change and unprecedented prosperity. The middle class benefited greatly, partly by acquiring valuable skills and partly through state social programs. And although it is the better educated who benefit in today’s knowledge era, we maintain that democracy continues to play this role. Add in the very large constituency of aspirational families (often concerned about economic opportunities for their children), and the electoral concern with economic competence is understandable (see Mads Andrea Elkjær and Torben Iversen, World Politics, 2020; also contra Bartels and Gilens cited earlier by Boix).

Boix misreads us as arguing that democracy caused or was a precondition for advanced capitalism: evidently it did neither in the “new industrializers.” And as we underscored in the book, nineteenth-century capitalists in the coordinated economies were hostile to political democracy. Our argument in those countries is, if anything, that the necessity of cooperation with skilled workers led to the eventual development of democracy. When democracy did emerge, it took the form of PR. Since it is not essential to the broader argument, we refrain from a detailed response here (one can be found in Cusack et al., APSR 103, May 2010, 393-403).

In the United Kingdom the story is more complex: advanced capitalism developed in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and governments through the nineteenth century wanted modernization and centralization (Gary W. Cox, The Efficient Secret, 1987), both to help foster industrialization and to keep the empire running. The complex 1867 Reform Act probably did reflect the need for liberals and modernizers to get support from the “safe” skilled (and not large) working class; yet (very limited) democracy was also about constraining the landed elites who opposed major expansions of education. Forster’s 1870 Education Act was a result. The slightly gratuitous last Boix paragraph misreads Morrisson and Murtin’s 2009 article cited earlier: UK education was on average 20% behind that of other advanced economies (apart from France)—and was far more wanting if vocational training is added in— and caught up over the subsequent two or three decades (similarly to the French Third Republic experience and the Ferry legislation).

Boix also suggests that we misread the present political situation. He argues that changing geographical patterns since Fordism as a result of the cross-national geography of the global (or triad) value chains vitiates our general argument. We disagree. The value-added of advanced capitalist companies (including the knowledge-based subsidiaries of multinationals in the advanced economies) lies in their embedded skilled workforces: these they cannot relocate. Advanced capitalism is not a key purposive actor (at least in the advanced democracies). “Footloose” capitalism, eroding the autonomy of contemporary advanced democracies, which was never plausible, is even less so in the knowledge era. The argument is laid out in detail in chapter 4.