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This paper contributes to Comparative Political Economy (CPE) by developing an analytical concept of corporate welfare. Corporate welfare—the transfer of public funds and benefits to corporate actors with weak or no conditionality—is a prominent form of state-business relations that CPE scholarship regularly overlooks and misinterprets. Such transfers should be understood as a structural privilege of business in a globalized post-Fordist capitalism, and an increasingly common strategy through which states attempt to steward national economic dynamism within a highly constrained range of policy options. However, without a well-developed concept of corporate welfare—premised upon the key criterion of conditionality—studies that identify a "return" of the state in industrial planning misrepresent these transfers to business as a reassertion of state influence and control, rather than a reflection of state weakness and subordination. The paper provides the analytical building blocks to properly conceptualize transfers to business, works out the core challenges for empirical research, and provides empirical illustrations of this burgeoning phenomenon from the fields of unconventional monetary policy, privatization, and urban political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues for the utility in conceiving of two distinctive approaches to the structural power of finance—New Structural Power (NSP) and Traditional Structural Power (TSP). While both are crucial to political economy scholarship, this article highlights the intellectual trade-off that is inherent to the adoption of one perspective over the other, and it stresses the explanatory advantages of the TSP perspective specifically. First, it shows how the TSP framework can facilitate an understanding of when policymaker ideas do and do not matter in the exercise of structural power, retaining the concept of "automaticity" in structural power operations. Second, it demonstrates how each framework is custom-built to explain substantively different aspects of the policy process, with TSP research aimed at system-oriented limitation mechanisms and NSP research aimed at agent-oriented selection mechanisms. Third, it contends that TSP formulations must be embedded within a model of (contradictory) functional explanation, which is the best way to gain empirical traction on the most important macrostructural developments in contemporary finance-led capitalism. Methodologically, this implies an agenda of "explanation through commonalities" rather than the NSP-favored "explanation through variation." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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For most analysts, Brexit reveals the highly contingent power of finance and the clear limits to its ability to influence crucial policymaking outcomes. By contrast, I contend that UK-EU negotiations demonstrate the unique capacity of finance to secure substantial commercial protections relative to all other business sectors and that the structural sources of the City's political power remain exceptionally robust. Elaborating a notion of 'structural interdependence', the paper demonstrates how policy officials on both sides came to perceive that the future prosperity and stability of their economies relied upon maintaining open trading relations in financial services. This necessitated broad continuity in access to London's deep financial markets for EU firms and preservation of the City's leading role in the UK growth regime. In establishing these claims empirically, I document an extensive range of contingency measures designed throughout December 2018-April 2019 that would function to protect the financial industry from economic disruption in the event of a no-deal Brexit. The outcome illustrates how finance benefits from a form of structural power that does not require instrumental mobilisation, but rather shapes policy decisions on the basis of deeply entrenched and commercially vital cross-border financial entanglements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]