Good Governance Gone Bad: How Nordic Adaptability Leads to Excess

GOOD GOVERNANCE GONE BAD

How Nordic Adaptability Leads to Excess

Darius Ornston

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON

To Eric

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Nordic Paradox

1. Good Governance Gone Bad: Overshooting in Nordic Europe

2. Manufacturing a Crisis: Planning in Sweden

3. Connecting People: Innovation in Finland

4. From Banking on Fish to Fishy Banks: Liberalization in Iceland

5. Overshooting in Comparative Perspective: Contrasting Cases

6. Overshooting beyond Nordic Europe: Ireland and Estonia

Conclusion: Lessons for Large States

Appendix 1: Measuring Cohesive, Encompassing Networks

Appendix 2: Characterizing Economic Adjustment

Notes

References

Index

Acknowledgments

This book was inspired by fieldwork in Denmark, Finland, Sweden, and Ireland in the early 2000s. In seeking to understand how these countries engineered big leaps into new industries, I was struck by the informal ties that united my interviewees. Across the business system and ideological spectrum, the people I spoke with responded to open-ended questions about economic competitiveness by identifying common challenges, proposing similar solutions, and even employing identical metaphors. Although I did not anticipate it at the time, these observations would prove useful when I sought to make sense of the Danish housing crisis, the Irish banking crisis, the decline of the Finnish ICT industry, and the Icelandic hedge fund debacle. I am thus indebted to those who funded and guided that earlier work, including the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the American-Scandinavian Foundation, the Berkeley Department of Scandinavian Studies, the Swedish Embassy in Washington, DC, the University of California at Berkeley, the Research Institute of the Finnish Economy, Copenhagen Business School, Mandag Morgen, University College Dublin, and the Swedish Institute for Working Life.

I transformed this puzzle into a book at the University of Georgia and the University of Toronto. The University of Georgia, UGA’s Department of International Affairs, the University of Toronto, the Munk School of Global Affairs, and the Connaught Fund financed additional fieldwork in Finland, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Portugal, and Sweden between 2012 and 2016. I also benefited from an exceptionally collegial working environment at the Department of International Affairs and the Munk School of Global Affairs, both of which encouraged me to investigate the Nordic paradox identified at the beginning of this book.

Indeed, this project depended more on people than places, and it was ultimately my colleagues, students, and hundreds of interviewees who made this work possible. For a project six years in the making, and whose origins stretch back even earlier, the number of individuals who volunteered their time and contributed to the book are too numerous to name. Some, principally interviewees, requested anonymity. But a list would certainly include Chris Allen, Vicki Birchfield, Danny Breznitz, Shiri Breznitz, Markus Crepaz, Keith Gehring, Gernot Grabher, Eskil Ekstedt, Peter Katzenstein, Paulette Kurzer, Niamh Hardiman, Roger Haydon, Wade Jacoby, Florian Justwan, Bill Kissane, Peer Hull Kristensen, Jonah Levy, Cas Mudde, Dann Naseemullah, Sean O’Riain, Christopher Palmberg, Øve Kaj Pedersen, Erik Rasmussen, Olli Rehn, Martin Rhodes, Petri Rouvinen, Sebastian Royo, Herman Schwartz, Zak Taylor, Mark Vail, Vesa Vihriälä, Toby Schulze-Cleven, David Wolfe, Joseph Wong, Pekka Ylä-Anttila, Nick Ziegler, and John Zysman, as well as the referees who commented on this and related work.

From this long list, I should single out Peter Katzenstein, whose work on small states inspired my interest in European politics (as well as Bruce Morrison, who recommended it). Peter’s detailed remarks on this manuscript strengthened the book considerably. Danny Breznitz also deserves special mention, acting as a sounding board and helping develop the argument from the earliest stages of the project until the final draft.

Finally, I thank my family, who endured my idiosyncratic interests with patience and grace. I am particularly grateful to my mother, who has delivered detailed feedback since I started writing and provided line-by-line commentary on a far less readable draft of this book. I am also grateful for Eric, to whom this book is dedicated. His wide-ranging and enthusiastic intellectual adventures are an enduring source of joy and inspiration in work and play. To Eric, my mother, and the rest of my family, thank you, and I promise to speak about something other than policy overshooting in small states, at least for a few years.

Introduction

THE NORDIC PARADOX

The Nordic states have attracted attention for their capacity to adopt best practice in a wide variety of policy domains. The Economist recently labeled the region a supermodel (Economist 2013), as organizations such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the OECD have singled out Nordic achievements in labor-market policy, education, and innovation policy, among others (Dahlman, Routti, and Ylä-Anttila 2006a; OECD 2010; Zhou 2007). Partly as a result of these reforms, Nordic countries have seized leadership in a diverse array of dynamic knowledge-intensive industries including biotechnology, financial services, software, and telecommunications equipment. Rapid innovation has, in turn, contributed to robust economic growth and low unemployment, with the result that these economies are routinely ranked among the most competitive in the world by organizations such as Institute for Management Development and the World Economic Forum.

Although illuminating, these laudatory accounts often overlook the region’s inconsistent and troubled economic history. Contemporary high-technology leaders such as Finland and Sweden were heavily dependent on low- and medium-technology industries such as metal-processing and papermaking in the early postwar period. Policy makers and business leaders were slow to adapt to new challenges in the 1970s, and the decision to double down on established strategies led to unsustainable fiscal and trade deficits by the 1980s. By the end of the century, the diminutive Nordic region had generated three of the big five postwar banking crises (Rogoff and Reinhart 2009, 160). The Nordic countries responded effectively to those shocks, but they continue to exhibit similar vulnerabilities. Sweden fueled one of the largest ICT bubbles in Western Europe in the late 1990s, Denmark created an American-style housing bubble in the mid-2000s, and Finland proved exceptionally susceptible to a single technological innovation, the iPhone, in 2007. Not to be outdone, Iceland managed to establish a new standard for economic mismanagement by inflating bank assets from 100 percent to 800 percent of GDP between 2000 and 2007.

These crises are even more perplexing because they cannot be attributed to crony capitalism, rent-seeking, or the other ills that commonly plague crisis-prone countries. On the contrary, the Nordic countries routinely rank among the most trusting and least corrupt societies in the world (Rothstein and Stolle 2003, 11; Transparency International 2010), with a capacity to deliver high-quality collective goods from education to infrastructure. Naturally, international openness increases their exposure to disruptive economic shocks, and the downturns described above can, to some extent, be attributed to bad luck (Schwartz and Becker 2005b, 17). But this book demonstrates that these crises were also shaped by poor policy choices, sharply at odds with the conventional image of the Nordic region. How do we explain this Nordic paradox? Why are the Nordic states so successful economically?¹ And why do these paragons of good governance make such terrible policy choices and poor investment decisions? In short, how can we reconcile these two, contradictory images of Nordic capitalism?

Nordic economic success is a puzzle in its own right. Often treated collectively, the Nordic countries have thrived in very different ways. Some countries, such as Iceland, have prospered under state intervention. Others, such as Denmark, have favored more market-oriented arrangements. Sweden successfully incorporated organized labor within a generous welfare state, whereas Finland flourished for decades by repressing it. Partly as a result of this, the Nordic countries have excelled in very different industries. Iceland and Norway continue to rely heavily on low-technology, resource-based industries such as fishing and oil, while Finland and Sweden have assumed leadership in radically innovative high-technology markets and knowledge-intensive services. In fact, the same countries have prospered with fundamentally different institutions and industries, as evidenced by Finland’s evolution from a heavily regulated, labor-repressive, resource-extractive economy into a more equitable, but highly competitive, high-technology leader (see chapter 3).

The most common explanations for Nordic success, focusing on the state, labor, or industry, fail to capture the region’s diversity. The most popular narrative among economists focuses on the benefits of robust market competition, attributing Nordic success to high levels of foreign trade and investment (Economist 2013). Without denying that the Nordic countries have benefited from economic openness, it is important to recognize that they also boast some of the largest public sectors in the world. Even more importantly, some Nordic countries, such as Finland and Iceland, thrived for decades under relatively closed economic regimes, with heavily regulated product and financial markets.²

An alternative approach views the public sector as an asset and emphasizes the benefits of universal social policies. Broad-based investments in collective goods such as childcare and continuing education represent a valuable resource for entrepreneurial individuals and the firms that employ them (Kristensen 2011, 221).³ This statist explanation, however, also falters when situated in comparative and historical perspective. As this book relates, iconic welfare states such as Sweden ranked among the most laissez-faire societies in Western Europe before World War II.

Theories that privilege social democratic ideology or working-class power resources are problematic for similar reasons.⁴ Finnish political and industrial elites marginalized organized labor until the 1960s and they continued to prioritize industry-friendly instruments such as subsidies for research and development (R&D) over more social democratic measures such as continuing education into the twenty-first century (Ornston 2012a, 694–98). Social democracy played an even more peripheral role in Iceland, where the conservative Independence Party played a near-hegemonic role in Icelandic politics.

More recent scholarship has shifted attention away from the size and power of working-class organizations such as trade unions to the organizational capacity of employers (Hall and Soskice 2001, 15). Coordination, where production is influenced by long-term nonmarket relationships among firms and other actors, enables countries to invest in sophisticated collective goods from specialized equipment to vocational training and high-quality standards (Hall and Soskice 2001, 39). The Nordic experience, however, challenges the Varieties of Capitalism literature in two ways. First, the literature is insensitive to the diverse ways Nordic firms coordinate economic activity.⁵ Second, the Varieties of Capitalism framework argues that coordinated market economies compete by gradually upgrading established, century-old industries such as automobiles or machine tools. This works well for Central European states such as Austria and Switzerland (see chapter 5), but it offers little insight into the sharp institutional and economic shifts that characterize Nordic economic history (Ornston 2013, 705).

The literature on small states offers an alternative way to understand Nordic success (Katzenstein 1985). Instead of emphasizing the state, organized labor, or employers, this work focuses on the relationship among them. More specifically, geographic proximity and geopolitical vulnerability lead to a high level of interconnectedness and support national cooperation (Campbell and Hall 2017, 6). As I relate in chapter 5, this is not true of all small states. In the Nordic region, however, late industrialization, external threats, and a common ethnic, linguistic, and religious heritage have led these societies to develop particularly cohesive and encompassing networks.⁶ Relationships are cohesive in the sense that they are characterized by a high level of trust; they are encompassing in the sense that they transcend regional, political, socioeconomic, and sectoral cleavages (see appendix 1).⁷

The literature on small states (Bodley 2013), and on political economy more broadly (Ostrom 1990; Putnam 1993), suggests that these cooperative relationships improve economic performance by enabling governments and private-sector actors to invest in collective goods. Widely distributed networks permit policy makers to access high-quality expertise from across society as well as local information from ordinary citizens. The threat of exclusion from dense networks raises the cost of free riding, shirking, and other opportunistic behaviors, which are easier to identify with a relatively small number of actors (Jalan 1982). Finally, the ability to coordinate across multiple policy domains and actors enables these societies to produce complex, sophisticated collective goods ranging from ambitious innovation policies to comprehensive, green infrastructure. These social structures are particularly effective when subject to market competition. In the Nordic countries, international openness acts as a safeguard against economic mismanagement (Andersen et al. 2007, 17).

In this book, I argue that this work on small states provides a more compelling explanation for Nordic economic success than theories that focus exclusively on markets, the state, trade unions, or employers. Even as the settings, instruments, and even objectives of public policy and corporate strategy have varied, cohesive and encompassing social networks have remained a defining feature of Nordic economic governance for over a century. These dense relationships have enabled public and private actors to invest in a variety of high-quality public goods, supporting fundamentally different growth regimes. After relying on natural resources to industrialize, the Nordic countries thrived during the era of Fordist-style, large-scale manufacturing, using statist instruments to compete in a variety of heavy industries. In the late twentieth century they again adapted public policy and corporate strategy, liberalizing their economies and redefining themselves as leaders in high-technology manufacturing. When those markets were transformed by disruptive technological innovations and low-cost competitors, they reinvented themselves anew, entering knowledge-intensive services.⁸

At the same time, this book exposes two shortcomings in the literature on small states. First, even as scholars consistently emphasize flexible adaptation, the transformative capacity of these tight-knit relationships is often understated. Perhaps because cooperation is generally conceptualized as an incremental force in political economy (Hall and Soskice 2001, 39), scholars of small states commonly emphasize incremental upmarket movement within established, stable niches (Katzenstein 1985, 79; Kristensen and Levinsen 1983). This work accurately reflects Central European economies such as Austria and Switzerland, but it does not capture the pace and scope of change articulated above.⁹ The Nordic countries have adapted to disruptive economic shocks by fundamentally restructuring their economies, shifting from natural resources to heavy industry, and then from Fordist-style manufacturing to rapid technological innovation and sophisticated services.

I argue that the Nordic countries can do so, because the information-gathering, consensus-building, and coordinating capacities described above are more dynamic than we recognize. Scholars have historically focused on welfare capitalism, in part because of their interest in cross-class relations (Katzenstein 1985, 48–53; Thorhallsson 2010, 380). But tight-knit networks can also support investments in innovation or, even more counterintuitively, radical market-oriented reform. Meanwhile, cross-regional and cross-sectoral ties facilitate the diffusion of new business models within the private sector. Far from delaying the pace of restructuring, these cohesive social structures can accelerate it.

This more dynamic vision of cooperation illuminates a second limitation. Because cooperation is widely perceived to delay the pace of reform and restructuring, scholars focus on the risk of political paralysis and economic stagnation (Grabher 1993, 260–64). In Nordic Europe, and elsewhere, this danger is addressed by subjecting communities to market competition (Andersen et al. 2007, 17). I argue, however, that cohesive, encompassing relationships can lead to too much change. Widely distributed networks expose policy makers to bad ideas as well as good ones. Even more importantly, the ability to coordinate public and private sector activity can lead societies to scale the best ideas to dangerous and unsustainable heights. In short, the Nordic countries, and tight-knit communities more generally, are vulnerable to policy overshooting and overinvestment. Unfortunately, international markets, the most popular solution to political paralysis, are less effective in diagnosing these problems, particularly during good times.

As a result, I argue that cohesive, encompassing social networks lead to a distinctive pattern of adjustment in Nordic Europe. While international markets eventually identify flawed institutions or misallocated resources, this often occurs after the Nordic countries have scaled new ideas to dangerous extremes. Consensus building and coordination enable these societies to respond quickly and effectively to the resulting economic crisis. These societies use dense, widely distributed networks to thoroughly overhaul their policies and fundamentally transform their economies, all within the span of a decade. But with few checks against the misallocation of resources as the economy booms, the Nordic countries are vulnerable to a new round of overshooting and overinvestment. The result is an admirable but volatile pattern of economic adjustment. The same forces that facilitate rapid reform and restructuring generate new excesses in a recurring pattern of overcorrection.

These findings have important consequences for how we understand and conduct economic policy in small and large states alike. First, the book contributes to the growing recognition that size is an important variable (Campbell and Hall 2009; Katzenstein 1985) and, perhaps more importantly, that state size is socially constructed (Brown and Purcell 2005, 607; Kuokstis 2015, 114). The literature on international relations often defines small states by objective criteria such as population, gross domestic product, or economic openness, and there are advantages to doing so. The case studies in this book, however, suggest that comparably sized countries have responded to similar structural conditions in very different ways. The Nordic countries developed collective responses to capital scarcity and geopolitical vulnerability, whereas similar challenges divided their Southern European counterparts (see chapter 5). The effects of constrained geopolitical space are not uniform.

Second, closer attention to cohesive and encompassing social networks demystifies the much-discussed Nordic model. By examining different Nordic countries across several different time periods, I suggest that economic growth cannot be attributed to a specific ideology or policy. Instead, I argue that the Nordic region is defined by widely distributed, high-trust social networks, which have enabled these countries to invest in a variety of high-quality collective goods. By isolating the politics of interconnectedness, I suggest how other countries can learn from and copy Nordic strategies. The lessons are most obvious for small countries such as Estonia and Ireland with dense, informal networks (chapter 6), but even large countries can replicate Nordic success by leveraging tight-knit interpersonal networks at the local level (conclusion).

Third, I challenge the widespread perception in business, economic sociology, geography, political science, and innovation studies that dense, high-trust networks delay reform and restructuring (Grabher 1993, 260–64; Hall and Soskice 2001, 65; Hommen and Edquist 2008, 477; Katzenstein 1985, 47). I argue that cohesive, encompassing networks can also lead to paradigmatic institutional shifts, from competition to coordination, investment to innovation, and statism to liberalism. These comprehensive reforms have enabled the Nordic countries to develop fundamentally new products, services, and industries within a remarkably short period of time. In other words, nonliberal economies are considerably more dynamic than we recognize, and policy makers seeking to accelerate restructuring may benefit from considering the politics of cooperation as well as the politics of (market) competition.

At the same time, I seek to counterbalance the celebratory literature on small states and the Nordic countries in particular. To date, this work has been overwhelmingly positive, highlighting their flexibility, pragmatism, and superior policy-making capacity (Bodley 2013; Campbell and Hall 2009; Pekkarinen, Pohjola, and Rowthorn 1992). To the extent that the literature identifies problems, it often focuses on their vulnerability to larger, more powerful actors or external forces (Thorhallsson 2010, 384). By contrast, I argue that many of the crises these societies experience are also self-generated. The same cohesive, encompassing networks that underpin good governance also lead to policy errors and terrible investment decisions. It is important for policy makers to acknowledge this risk, as international markets provide few checks against policy overshooting and overinvestment during good times.

Finally, this focus on cohesive, encompassing social networks has important implications for how we understand good governance in all societies. The Nordic countries illuminate a novel problem with the cooperative relationships celebrated in literatures on economic coordination (Hall and Soskice 2001), network-building (Ansell 2000), social capital (Putnam 1993), and associative democracy (Rogers and Cohen 1995). Commonly believed to delay change, dense social networks can accelerate the diffusion of bad ideas and lead communities to scale good ideas to dangerous, unsustainable heights. The Nordic countries represent an important counterpoint to the common argument that more cooperation would help larger countries navigate contemporary problems, from financial regulation (Rosenthal, Poole, and McCarty 2013) to grand challenges (Deak and Peredy 2015). The Nordic countries also highlight the very real risk of policy overshooting and overinvestment in tight-knit local communities within large societies. In short, overshooting is not just a Nordic problem.

I develop this argument in six steps. In chapter 1 I resolve the Nordic paradox by turning to the literature on small states. I begin with the unusually cohesive and encompassing social networks that characterize the Nordic states and explain how this social structure supports effective policy making and successful economic adjustment. More specifically, I discuss how dense, high-trust relationships facilitate reform and restructuring through three mechanisms: the politics of persuasion, the politics of compensation, and the politics of coordination. At the same time, these dynamic forces increase the region’s vulnerability to policy overshooting, overinvestment, and economic crises. For additional information on the measurement of cohesive, encompassing networks and economic volatility, I refer the reader to two appendices at the end of the volume.

In chapter 2 I begin the empirical section of the book with the Swedish case. This case study performs two roles. As the largest and most pluralist of the three Nordic countries in this book, Sweden functions as a contrasting case. Readers looking for a more extreme example of reform, restructuring, and overshooting should skip ahead to Finland or, better yet, Iceland. Relative to most other countries, however, Sweden is a cohesive, tight-knit society and the industrial policies of the early postwar period reflect this. Beginning in the 1930s, policy makers across the world turned to credit rationing, state aid, and planning. This volte-face away from free markets was particularly pronounced in Sweden, which could rely on tight-knit networks to implement and scale new ideas through the politics of persuasion, compensation, and coordination. In many respects, Sweden eclipsed even France, the paradigmatic statist economy, both in its capacity to reform public policy as well as its ability to foster the growth of large, capital-intensive manufacturing enterprises. At the same time, state intervention proved increasingly dysfunctional over time, generating unsustainable trade and fiscal deficits and a deep economic crisis.

In chapter 3 I turn to Finland, a smaller and more tight-knit society that relied even more heavily on state intervention and low-technology industry in the early postwar period and experienced an even deeper crisis by the early 1990s. To advance the argument, this chapter focuses instead on the emergence of innovation policy and new digital technologies in the late twentieth century. Finland was among the most aggressive and successful countries in the world in converting traditional industrial policies into new innovation policies. I identify the specific ways in which policy makers used tight-knit networks to fundamentally restructure Finnish economic institutions. Together with entrepreneurial private-sector actors, namely Nokia, they transformed Finland from one of the lowest technology economies in the OECD into one of the most research-intensive societies in the world. At the same time, I reveal that Finland relied so heavily on technological innovation that it increased its vulnerability to adverse economic shocks, most notably the invention of the iPhone.

In chapter 4 I examine Iceland. Characterized by exceptionally tight-knit informal networks, it developed the most extreme form of statism of these three cases. Although slower than Finland or Sweden to embrace new innovation policies, this is mainly because its policy makers reacted to the failure of statism in a very different way. Iceland instead prioritized liberalization and deregulation, suggesting that policy overshooting and overinvestment is not simply a story about state intervention. On the contrary, Icelandic policy makers used formal and informal networks to liberalize their economy even more rapidly and radically than neoliberal icons such as Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher. Institutional reform spurred movement into new industries, such as financial services, partly because of the policy innovations described above and partly because of the speed with which new ideas diffused within dense interpersonal networks in the private sector. At the same time, public- and private-sector actors were slow to recognize the ensuing financial bubble, and Iceland suffered the largest banking economic crisis in human history, eclipsing not only financial powerhouses such as the United Kingdom and the United States but also the Swedish and Finnish banking crises of the early 1990s.

The book gains analytic leverage by comparing relatively fragmented Nordic societies (Sweden) to tight-knit ones (Iceland), but in chapter 5 I increase the range of the independent variable by examining several small, open societies without cohesive, encompassing networks. Austria and Switzerland have developed a consensual approach to economic adjustment that enables them to resolve basic collective action problems, but these federal, sectorally coordinated societies are also marked by more salient regional, linguistic, and industrial cleavages. These divisions have created a pronounced status quo bias, favoring the gradual modernization of established niches rather than Nordic-style reform and restructuring. In addition to eliminating alternative explanations for Nordic volatility such as economic openness, the Austrian and Swiss cases suggest that countries can prosper without Nordic levels of social cohesion. The Greek and Portuguese cases, however, reveal that excessive fragmentation can also pose a problem. Although small and ethnically homogeneous, these societies are far more polarized than their Nordic or Central European counterparts and have struggled to resolve even the most basic collective action problems such as industrial peace and macroeconomic stability. As a result, these countries experienced recurring economic crises, albeit for very different reasons from those of their Nordic counterparts. Here, the issue has not been too much reform and restructuring but too little.

The formidable barriers to cooperation in Southern Europe raise the question whether any country can learn from Nordic Europe. To this end, chapter 6 identifies two non-Nordic societies with cohesive and encompassing networks. I begin with Ireland, a liberal market economy characterized by exceptionally strong informal relationships between public- and private-sector actors. Ireland clearly varies from Nordic Europe in its heavy reliance on foreign direct investment, but I identify a strikingly similar series of abrupt policy reversals and dramatic boom-bust cycles. I then turn to Estonia, where tight-knit relationships among Estonian speakers supported comprehensive reform and restructuring. In addition to outpacing its Central and East European peers in liberalization and deregulation, dense, widely distributed ties also facilitated the exceptionally rapid digitalization of Estonian society. In doing so, they also increased the country’s vulnerability to external shocks, including the 2007–2009 credit crunch and the emerging threat of cyberwarfare.

I conclude by examining the lessons for large countries. At first glance, large states such as France, Germany, and the United States appear very different from their Nordic counterparts. Although these societies have evolved over time, I demonstrate that reform and restructuring has proceeded at a slower pace, overshooting has been less pronounced, and economic volatility has been lower. At the same time, I suggest that even fragmented, polarized countries may resemble the Nordic region at a local level, where individuals are more likely to know and trust one another. Examining the politics of economic adjustment in San Diego, California, and Waterloo, Ontario, I illustrate how local communities can use the politics of interconnectedness to accelerate restructuring, as well as the risks associated with this.

1

GOOD GOVERNANCE GONE BAD

Overshooting in Nordic Europe

Why are the Nordic countries so economically successful? And why do these seemingly well-governed societies suffer such severe economic crises? In this chapter I argue that the cause of these two apparently contradictory phenomena is one and the same: the tight-knit relationships that connect elites (and masses) across different regions, sectors, and socioeconomic classes. I begin by explaining how cohesive, encompassing networks facilitate investment in a wide range of collective goods, from peaceful industrial relations to human capital. If anything, the literature on small states (and cooperation more generally) understates the benefits of these social structures. Dense ties can accelerate policy reform and industrial restructuring by enabling entrepreneurial actors to persuade skeptics, compensate losers, and coordinate activity. These same processes, however, can lead to policy overshooting, overinvestment, and economic volatility. Although international openness guards against economic mismanagement in hard times, it does little to check excess in good times. The result is a distinctive pattern of economic volatility in which the Nordic countries respond effectively to economic crises but are prone to policy errors and bad investments when things are going well.

Small States, Interconnectedness, and Good Governance

As I relate in the introduction and subsequent chapters, Nordic success is intrinsically perplexing, because the Nordic countries have succeeded in contrasting ways using different economic models. Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden have prospered under highly interventionist regimes and laissez-faire ones, opening themselves to international trade and developing behind protective tariffs. They have relied on lightly processed natural resources and excelled in cutting-edge high-technology markets. Partly because of this diversity, scholars have cycled among competing explanations, alternately emphasizing the strength of the state (Rothstein and Stolle 2003, 19), labor power resources (Korpi 2006, 202), or employer organization (Hall and Soskice 2001, 15). In fact, these characteristics have varied considerably, both cross-nationally and over time.

The literature on small states suggests that the unifying thread in the Nordic region is not a particular industry, economic model, or even a single actor but rather the relationship among them. More specifically, elites (and masses) are connected within cohesive, encompassing networks (Campbell and Hall 2017, 34). These relationships are cohesive in the sense that actors trust one another and have an easy time cooperating. They are encompassing in the sense that they transcend political, regional, and sectoral divisions. In other words, Nordic societies’ dense, high-trust relationships take the form of bridging rather than bonding capital, cutting across salient social cleavages rather than reinforcing them (Rothstein and Stolle 2003, 9).

In appendix 1 I discuss the conceptualization and measurement of these cohesive, encompassing relationships, making the case that the Nordic countries are unusually interconnected. It is worth emphasizing, however, several key differences between this book and other research on small states. First, small size may be a necessary condition for the creation of cohesive, encompassing networks (Campbell and Hall 2009, 548), but it is most certainly not a sufficient one. This is most obvious in the highly polarized small states of Southern Europe such as Greece and Portugal, but it also applies to Austria and Switzerland, where industry is generally organized along regional or sectoral lines rather than national ones (see chapter 5). In Nordic Europe, however, constrained geopolitical space has interacted with external security threats and cultural homogeneity to foster the development of unusually broad, dense, and high-quality social ties.

Scholars historically have used the language of neocorporatism, a formal system of interest intermediation in which policy makers cooperate with large, encompassing producer associations, specifically trade unions and employers, to characterize these relationships (Fioretos 2013, 312; Katzenstein 1985, 91; Thorhallsson and Kattel 2013, 84). The Nordic countries rank high on measures of neocorporatism and this captures an important form of interconnectedness.¹ This emphasis on industrial relations and cross-class cooperation, however, does not directly address the corporate linkages that might accelerate (or inhibit) the diffusion of new business models within the private sector. As a result, we need to consider interfirm relations and the degree to which these do (or do not) transcend political, regional, or sectoral cleavages.

This interest on interfirm relations is reminiscent of the Varieties of Capitalism literature, which seeks to measure the degree of strategic coordination among firms. In appendix 1, however, I outline several problems with coordination, not least of which is the insensitivity to the dense informal ties that structure life in small states.² Scholarship and interviews alike suggest that individuals are more likely to be connected through professional associations, military service, common courses, soccer clubs, informal roundtables, and even family ties (Gingrich and Hannerz 2017, 13). Even when not directly connected, concentrated media markets bind actors by generating shared experiences and values (Gingrich and Hannerz 2017, 24). Widely acknowledged in the literature on small states (Katzenstein 1985, 89; Rehn 1996, 234), these informal ties lie at the center of my analysis, which uses 335 interviews to characterize social relations instead of relying exclusively on quantitative measures of neocorporatism or coordination (see appendix 1).

Whether employing the language of neocorporatism, coordination, or informal networks, research on small and large states alike has argued that cohesive, encompassing ties can improve the quality of governance by facilitating investment in collective goods. Neocorporatism has been linked to peaceful industrial relations, price stability, lower unemployment, higher growth, and a host of other positive economic outcomes as very large producer associations internalize the cost of their demands (Soskice 1990, 37). When this pattern of organization extends to the corporate sector, the Varieties of Capitalism literature suggests that dense interfirm relationships permit investment in more specialized inputs such as human capital, technological development, and product standards (Ornston and Schulze-Cleven 2015, 562–63).

Research suggests that dense informal relationships deliver similar benefits. Economists point out that tight-knit networks facilitate investment in collective goods by making it easier to detect opportunistic behavior and raising the reputational cost of free riding or shirking. For example, opportunistic firms jeopardize access to training,