The Political Economy of Brexit and the Future of British Capitalism First Symposium

ABSTRACT

The political economy of Brexit generates new challenges for the UK’s national business model and for European capitalism more broadly. Two symposia examine the implications of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU in key economic policy areas. These symposia contribute to two main bodies of academic literature: the political economy literature on varieties of capitalism, with a specific focus on the UK, and the political economy literature on key economic policy areas of the EU. This short introduction to the first symposium first outlines the key features of the British variety of capitalism and highlight the main questions raised by Brexit in that respect. It then summarises the main findings of the papers of the first symposium and tease out some common themes.

KEYWORDS:

• Brexit
• European Union (EU)
• British capitalism
• political economy

Acknowledgements

The symposia mostly draw on a selection of papers from the 2016 workshop series ‘Britain and Europe: The Political Economy of Brexit’ funded by the White Rose Consortium. We wish to thank the Universities of Sheffield, York and Leeds for hosting the workshops. We are also grateful to our colleagues in these universities and in other universities for acting as chairs, discussants and more generally for providing feedback and advice on this project. We also wish to thank the reviewers of the symposia. Work on these symposia was partly carried out while Lucia Quaglia was a research fellow at the BIGSSS (University of Bremen) and the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg (HWK) and subsequently research fellow at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Scott Lavery is research fellow at the SPERI, University of Sheffield.

Lucia Quaglia is professor at the University of Bologna.

Charlie Dannreuther is lecturer at the University of Leeds.

Additional information

Funding

We wish to thank the White Rose for contributing to fund this project.