The outbreak of the global financial and economic crisis in 2007 brought the "active state" back into business. Whereas previous debates in Western countries were dominated by questions about a "retreat of the state" and the triumph of neo-liberalism, we have most recently faced a situation where governmental efforts have been undertaken to intervene more directly in the economy. This is particularly the case in states which had previously been reluctant to implement rescue packages for individual companies or to undertake industrial political measures as a whole. Thus, it has become evident that "pure institutional approaches" like Varieties of Capitalism, which focus exclusively on domestic institutional structures, cannot adequately explain the at times tremendous state intervention in economic sectors by Western governments. Nor can institutionalist approaches alone explain the diverging strategies evidenced in reference to intervention by these governments. The aim of this paper is to offer a new approach to explaining these anomalies. Theoretically, the paper argues it is valuable to merge the institutionalist approach described above with the "Societal Approach", which argues that material interests and societal ideas can explain diverging approaches to state intervention. This claim will subsequently be tested empirically in comparative case studies examining the divergence exhibited in reference to state interventions by two Western countries – Germany and the United Kingdom – in two economic sectors – the finance and automotive sectors – during the global economic crisis.
