The Second Digital Revolution: Superstar Clusters and the polarising reinvention of advanced capitalism

David Soskice

Chapter 30 in Handbook of Comparative Political Economy, 2025, pp 536-553 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Comparative political economy has focused largely on nation-states and national governments: too much, it is argued here. Insufficient attention is paid to the extraordinary contemporary waves of disruptive innovation, referred to in this chapter as the Second Digital Revolution (or the Fourth Industrial Revolution). These have been largely located in a limited number of Superstar Clusters, the focus of this chapter, into which a large proportion of the great increase in tertiary education graduates have flowed in the current millennium. Two political effects: the locational focus on Superstar Clusters has been socially, economically and politically polarising, playing a key part in right-wing populism. And the perceived decline in the stability of national governments is seen as a reflection of this bifurcation. But the governance of the Clusters is more powerful and anti-populist. Thus, the strength of Clusters should be analytically at the heart of debates on the future of democracy. However, there are important institutional and basic regulatory differences between Clusters across the advanced economies, generating important varieties of innovation/diffusion systems. Most notably, the US Clusters are the radical technology innovators, and the European and Asian Clusters the integrators of these radical technologies into often sophisticated manufactures and services.

Keywords: Second digital revolution; Superstar clusters; Polarisation; Declining real wage growth; Radical innovators; Transmitters; Integrators; American technology dominance; Rokkanian nation state in decline (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035327775
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