Convergence and Divergence

The concept of convergence is used increasingly frequently in the analysis of contemporary governance. In an era of globalization, it is often assumed, increasingly strong selection mechanisms influence the choice and development of governance regime such that they tend to converge over time. In many conventional accounts, heightened competition between states and national economies in an ever-more-integrated global market pit governance regimes against one another in an ever-more-intense competitive struggle. Only those regimes capable of sustaining high growth rates under such conditions will survive and prosper. Over time, through this neo-Darwinian process of “survival of the fittest,” the current diversity of governance regimes will be narrowed. The global diffusion of neoliberal governance is often predicted.

Though still deeply influential, this account has increasingly been challenged both theoretically and empirically. This has opened up as an area of considerable controversy the question of convergence, diversity, and divergence. Standard neoclassical models of an open and global economy do indeed predict convergence. Yet other more empirical perspectives, such as the new institutionalism and, in particular, the influential “varieties of capitalism” perspective, claim to reveal a rather more complex process of dual or co-convergence. This latter account differentiates between liberal market economies (archetypally, the United States and the United Kingdom) and coordinated market economies (archetypally, Germany), arguing that that there is evidence of convergence within but not between each group. This claim is defended both theoretically and empirically (notably by Peter Hall and David Soskice in 2001 and Geoffrey Garrett in 1998). Others claim that even the coconvergence thesis is an exaggeration and that heightened competition between states and national economies has, in fact, served to promote continued diversity and, if anything, furthered divergence in governance regimes rather than convergence.

However, the debate has often been characterized by the rather imprecise appeal to the language of convergence. Indeed, a variety of rather different and often incompatible senses of the term are often conflated. It is important, then, to be clear what the term implies, what it does not imply, and to what it might be taken to refer.

Consider first the definition of convergence. Here we can usefully draw on the important intervention of Torben Iversen and Jonas Pontusson in 2000. Motivated by a clear sense of frustration at the misuse of the term convergence, they differentiate helpfully between, on the one hand, the identification of common trends and, on the other, the demonstration of crossnational patterns of convergence. As they make clear, one need not necessarily imply the other. Two states can both adopt neoliberal policies without their governance regimes converging by so doing. As Iversen and Pontusson note, if we consider a quantifiable variable, such as the level of social spending within an economy, it is perfectly possible for that index to move in a common direction in two economies without those economies converging. For those economies to converge, the difference between the values of the variable in the two cases would have to shrink over time; this is by no means guaranteed simply by the identification of a common trend (in this case for the value of the variable to fall). Convergence implies that the rate of change of social spending is greater in the economy characterized by the higher initial value.

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