In the new issue of economic sociology. perspectives and conversations, development experts and economic sociologists join editor Mariana Heredia to explore development in the 21st century across Latin America and beyond. From discussions of competing notions of development to development in the context of antitrust and competition policy, finance, informality, and productive planning, each contributor to the new issue revisits the topic from their own perspective.

Andreas Maschke uses quantitative and qualitative text analyses to examine the discourse on the German current account surplus in seven national newspapers. The results show that the German surpluses are a controversial topic in the various newspapers.  Surprisingly, the newspapers published relatively few articles openly defending the German surpluses after 2014. The article discusses this finding and places it in the current literature on growth models in comparative political economy.

In his talk, Michael A. Wilkinson reflects on postwar Europe from the perspective of the long durée of European constitutional history and the interwar breakdown of liberal democracy. He suggests that far from “revolutionary,” as it has been characterized, postwar European constitutionalism is better understood as elitist and even counter-revolutionary in trajectory.