The political economy of finance in Germany: actors, coalitions, institutions, and power in times of global financial integration

The dramatic growth of global financial markets in recent decades has unleashed common pressures on diverse political economies with deep repercussions for the coherence of national financial systems. These dynamics are particularly pronounced in Germany, where a rise in actor plurality and competing interests within the financial sector has put the cohesion of domestic institutions into peril. To this date, comparative political economy often considers financial sectors homogenous, well organised, and powerful, while the importance of actor plurality and sectoral infighting for policymaking processes tends to go unheeded. In this dissertation, I challenge this common notion and explore how the pressures of global financial integration are mediated politically and filtered through existing institutions in Germany by the actors operating under them. In three papers I use a range of qualitative methods as well as network analysis and process tracing to investigate the pressures that global financial integration entails, the political conflicts it creates between dominant actors, and when and how the political resolution of these conflicts leads to institutional reform. I argue that financial integration is not an inexorable process, but deeply political with profound distributional implications. In this context, the political power of financial actors is contingent on the successful formation of coalitions with other producer groups, as well as on the alignment of interests with the electoral agendas of political decision makers. Putting the focus on actors as the bearers of institutional logics, this dissertation concludes that the viability of a capitalist model depends not simply on the effective exploitation of institutional complementarities, but on its political capacity to mediate conflict between dominant actors should complementarities begin to unravel. It contributes to debates in comparative political economy by demonstrating the relevance of coalition building for the political power of financial actors, and by investigating the logics, strategies, and objectives of international asset managers, and the degree of their dominance over domestic models of capitalism.