Compare methods

	Power Resources Analysis	Varieties of Capitalism Analysis
Field	Political Economy	Political Economy
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1983	2001
Originator	Walter Korpi & Gosta Esping-Andersen	Peter A. Hall & David Soskice
Type	Comparative political economy theory	Comparative institutional analysis framework
Seminal source	Korpi, W. (1983). The Democratic Class Struggle. Routledge & Kegan Paul. ISBN: 9780710094490	Hall, P. A., & Soskice, D. (Eds.). (2001). Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780199247752
Aliases	Power Resources Theory, Power Resource Approach, Class Mobilization Theory, Korpi Power Resources Model	VoC Analysis, Varieties of Capitalism Framework, Hall-Soskice Framework, Comparative Capitalisms Analysis
Related	4	4
Summary	Power resources analysis is a comparative political-economy framework, developed above all by Walter Korpi in The Democratic Class Struggle (1983) and extended by Gosta Esping-Andersen in The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (1990), that explains the size and shape of welfare states by the distribution of power resources between social classes. Its central claim is that under democratic capitalism the working class can offset capital's structural advantage in markets by mobilizing political power resources — above all the organizational strength of trade unions and the governing strength of left and labor parties. Where labor is strongly organized and durably in government, it builds class coalitions that translate that power into generous, redistributive social policy and a high degree of decommodification: the extent to which citizens can maintain a livelihood without depending on the market.	Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) analysis is a firm-centered comparative framework, set out by Peter A. Hall and David Soskice in their 2001 edited volume, for understanding why advanced capitalist economies are organized in systematically different ways. Its central move is to place the firm at the heart of the analysis and to ask how firms resolve the coordination problems they face with workers, owners, suppliers, and one another. The framework distinguishes two ideal types — Liberal Market Economies (LMEs) such as the United States and United Kingdom, where firms coordinate primarily through competitive markets, and Coordinated Market Economies (CMEs) such as Germany and Japan, where firms coordinate strategically through non-market institutions — and argues that institutions in different spheres reinforce one another to produce distinct, durable, and internally coherent national models with their own comparative institutional advantages.