This book explores the politics behind de-liberalization defined as policy reforms that
constrain markets and their underlying mechanisms. By offering a comparative study on the
governmental reform strategies and policy choices of Austria Germany and Switzerland it
demonstrates that de-liberalization processes are a common reform option for governments.
Utilizing a novel dataset on liberalization covering policy reform trajectories in 38
industrialized countries between 1973 and 2013 it shows that governments often draw on
strategies of de-liberalization in the fields of social welfare and labor market policy where
they can be used as compensation for the electorate in the context of liberalizing reforms. As
such the book makes an important contribution to the field of political economy by capturing
the turning of the tide in scholarly and policy attention away from liberalization and towards
a re-embedding and re-regulation of economic activity.
