Recent studies of welfare state attitudes in the knowledge economy find very high generalized support for generous welfare state policies, both among the working and the middle classes. Has class become irrelevant as a predictor of social policy preferences? Or do we simply mis‐conceptualise today's class conflict over social policy? To what extent has it changed from a divide over the level of social policy generosity to a divide over the kind of social policy and – more specifically – over the relative importance that should be given to different social policies? Answering these questions is not only relevant to understand welfare politics in the twenty‐first century, but electoral politics as well: only when we understand what working‐ and middle‐class voters care about, can we evaluate the role distributive policies play in electoral processes. We use original survey data from eight West European countries to show that middle‐ and working‐class respondents indeed differ in the relative importance they attribute to social investment and social consumption policies. Middle‐class respondents consistently attribute higher absolute and relative importance to social investment. We also show that this emphasis on investive policies relates to the middle class expecting better future economic and social opportunities than the working class. This divide in anticipated opportunities underlies a new kind of working‐ versus middle‐class divide, which contributes to transforming the class divide from a conflict over the level of social policy to a conflict over the priorities of social policy.

Investments in education and retraining, or research and development have become essential in today's knowledge‐intensive economies. While private actors often underprovided such knowledge‐based capital due to various market failures, there is also considerable variation in the extent to which governments invest in knowledge‐based capital due to cross‐sectional and intertemporal trade‐offs. I argue that in trying to account for this variation, corporatist institutions are a neglected but crucial factor. By necessitating and facilitating cooperation and compensation, corporatism creates a more collaborative style of policy making and a sense of common ownership of policy problems that helps overcome the trade‐offs associated with investments in knowledge‐based capital. Using within‐between mixed‐effects models on a novel time‐series‐cross‐sectional dataset, I find strong support for this argument. Corporatist countries invest a lot more in knowledge‐based capital, and corporatism also affects how countries react to deindustrialization. This is an important finding given the key role of long‐term policy making in areas like climate change politics, pandemic preparedness or responding to the digital transformation.

The rise of the knowledge economy draws workers towards concentrated skill clusters and creates political conflicts between urban high-opportunity areas and rural and suburban areas of lower dynamism. We advance the existing literature with a dynamic perspective by studying the political consequences of a structural pull into destinations that are typically more progressive than the places of origin. We create an innovative, multidimensional ‘opportunity map’ at the NUTS-3 level in Germany and merge this novel index with individual-level panel data to assess the political implications of residential relocation. Our findings consistently show that moving to opportunity results in stronger political integration, more left-leaning self-identification, and lower support for far-right parties. This article therefore underscores the role of structural change and internal migration in shaping political polarization: while economically motivated relocations to opportunity-rich destinations create significant progressive potential in knowledge hubs, the ongoing pull into thriving areas exacerbates resentments in low-opportunity places.

Collective skill formation systems were central to sustaining a high-road to economic development while upholding social inclusion in industrial societies. But can they still deliver on both economic and social grounds in knowledge-based societies? The article argues that the transition to the knowledge economy may in fact strengthen the ‘traditional’ advantage of collective skill formation systems over other skill formation systems on both economic and social grounds while simultaneously, however, exerting pressure on them to recalibrate some of their underlying policy arrangements. It is argued that this dual relationship has to do with the institutional architecture of collective skill formation systems, in particular, their ‘shared governance’ between employers, unions and governments, and with the nature of technological change in the transition to the knowledge economy, in particular the bias toward complex cognitive skills that it produces. Quantitative and qualitative evidence lends overall support for the argument. Regression analysis shows that collective skill formation systems are still positively associated with a range of socio-economic outcomes also in the new knowledge economy, although conditional analyses suggest that they may be subject to ‘diminishing returns’ on social inclusion grounds, i.e., their ability to effectively perform a social policy function is confronted with greater challenges at high levels of technological intensity. Case studies of Austria, Germany, and Switzerland show how collective skill formation systems have adapted to the knowledge economy following country-specific patterns.

Political scientists know surprisingly little about the political behavior of inventors, or those who produce new technologies. I therefore merged US patent and campaign contribution (DIME) data to reveal the donation behavior of 30,603 American inventors from 1980 through 2014. Analysis of the data produces three major findings. First, the Democratic Party has made significant inroads among American inventors, but these gains increasingly come from only a few regions and flow to a relatively small number of candidates. Second, deeper geographic trends explain most of the change in aggregate donation patterns. Third, inventors do not strategically donate to candidates outside their own district and, since 2006, inventors increasingly contribute to relatively centrist employer PACs with weak ties to the Democratic Party. These findings suggest that the interaction between market-oriented policy and American electoral institutions may inhibit the formation of broad cross-regional coalitions to support the knowledge economy.

Recent studies take increasingly refined views of how socioeconomic conditions influence political behaviour. We add to this literature by exploring how voters' prospective evaluations of long-term economic and social opportunities relate to electoral contestation versus the stabilization of the political-economic system underpinning the knowledge society. Using survey data from eight West European countries, we show that positive prospects are associated with higher support for mainstream parties (incumbents and opposition) and lower support for radical parties on all levels of material well-being. Our results support the idea that ‘aspirational voters’ with positive evaluations of opportunities (for themselves or their children) represent an important stabilizing force in advanced democratic capitalism. However, we also highlight the importance of radical party support among ‘apprehensive voters’, who are economically secure but perceive a lack of long-term opportunities. To assess the implications of these findings, we discuss the relative importance of these groups across different countries.

Indigenous or traditional knowledge (TK) systems are the springboard of authentic African innovation and creativity. However, there has been no adequate attempt to determine whether Africa internalizes its comparative advantage in Indigenous knowledge systems in its continental frameworks for socio-economic and development collaboration and aspirations. Despite TK's presumed significance and Africa's proactive promotion of Indigenous knowledge in international fora, TK is treated marginally in key instruments, perhaps as a legacy of colonially entrenched contempt for Indigenous knowledge systems. For Africa to effectively participate in the science and technology revolution, it is necessary to have an introspective and critical appraisal of the present traction around Indigenous knowledge, which is a logical starting point for effective science, technology and innovation policy-making in furtherance of African socio-economic and development collaboration in the knowledge economy.

Technological change has squeezed the demand for middle-skill jobs, which typically involve routine-intense tasks. This squeeze has coincided with an increase in the number of part-time working individuals who wish to work more hours. We argue that these two trends are linked. Due to the decline of middle-skill employment, medium-educated workers shift into low-skill employment, increasing the supply of labour for jobs in this segment of the labour market. This pushes those dependent on these jobs to accept part-time jobs, even if these involve fewer hours than they prefer. To empirically assess this claim, we analyse involuntary part-time employment across 16 European countries between 1999 and 2010. Our analysis confirms that a decline in middle-skill employment is associated with an increase in involuntary part-time employment at the bottom end of the labour market. This finding implies that the automation of routine-intense labour worsens employment possibilities in this segment of the labour market. However, we show that training and job creation schemes mitigate this effect. These programmes cushion competition either by providing medium-educated workers with the necessary skills to shift into high-skill jobs or by increasing employment possibilities. Thus, governments have the tools to support workers facing challenges in the knowledge economy.

Although it has a durable institutional shape, the operation of capitalism takes different forms across space and time with varying distributive effects. This article contributes to a growing literature considering the successive forms taken by capitalism in the developed democracies since World War II. It develops a distinctive conception of these forms as “growth regimes” that are mutually constituted by the core practices of firms and reinforcing public policies specific to each historical era. The movement of firm practices and government policies is then examined with a view to identifying the growth regimes of three postwar eras of modernization, liberalization, and knowledge-based growth.