The comparative political economy of industrial relations." Handbook of Comparative Political Economy. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2025. 267-285.

This chapter discusses the comparative political economy (CPE) of industrial relations by focusing both on the role and form of industrial relations institutions across national political economies and on the contribution of the discipline of industrial relations to CPE debates. The first part of the chapter outlines similarities and differences in industrial relations systems across the US and European countries and explores how the institutions of industrial relations evolved over time in the shift from Fordism to Postfordism. The identification of common trajectories of liberalization but persisting differences are central to the ‘convergence-divergence’ debate which has animated the field over the last three decades. The following section illustrates the role that the main CPE theoretical approaches assign to the institutions of industrial relations in capitalist economies, as well as the contribution of the comparative and multi-level approach of the discipline of industrial relations to the comparative study of contemporary capitalism.